The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery was published in two volumes by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1909. Washington undertook the project as a comprehensive history of Black people — beginning in Africa, tracing the Atlantic slave trade, covering American slavery and emancipation, and culminating in the post-Reconstruction era. The result is part history, part sociology, and part argument for Washington’s own philosophy of racial advancement.
The emphasis throughout is on achievement: Washington catalogs Black-owned businesses, educational institutions, churches, fraternal organizations, and agricultural enterprises with the thoroughness of a census. The message is consistent with everything else Washington wrote: look at what we have built, judge us by our productivity, and invest in our capacity to build more. The suffering is acknowledged but not dwelt upon; the resistance is noted but framed as economic rather than political.
As history, the work has obvious limitations — it is advocacy in the form of historiography, and its omissions (political organizing, radical thought, the violence of Jim Crow as a systemic rather than individual phenomenon) reflect Washington’s strategic priorities. But as a document of its moment, it reveals how a Black intellectual in 1909 chose to present the race’s past to a predominantly white readership, and what that choice cost.
Collecting The Story of the Negro
First edition (Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1909): Two volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition set, near fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $150–$350
- Single volumes: $50–$150