Booker T. Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was a African-American civil rights leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Born in to slavery and emancipated at the age of ninee believed the single greatest obstacle to racial progress in the United States was the deficiency of black education in the South, where the vast majority of American black people lived at the time. With financial, political, and moral support from some of the country's most prominent citizens (black and white) and organizations, he founded and administered the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, which eventually became the current Tuskegee University, one of the premier schools for African-American students of its time.

Among other activities, Washington also wrote extensively on the subject of civil rights and other topics. From his writings a number of famous quotations have been gleaned, including "One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him."

Booker T. Washington in Southern Victory
A Negro who got out of the CSA before the Great War said something to the effect of "If you hold a man down in the gutter, you have to get into the gutter yourself." This wisdom was repeated (and possibly misquoted) by Flora Blackford in a discussion with her brother David in 1945 on the topic of whether the US could afford to occupy territory formerly belonging to the defunct countries of the Confederacy and Canada without having its political institutions corrupted by authoritarianism not unlike that practiced by the Freedom Party. ===Literary Note:Though Washington is not identified by name in the text, the combination of the quote (or more likely paraphrase) with the time frame (leaving the CSA and coming north before the Great War) it does appear pretty clear that the Negro in question is Washington.