"...most influential Black intellectual voice of the generation that followed Frederick Douglass. Washington's contributions to modern Black American culture in the United States are immeasurable; it was his obsession with advancement through education that created the wide push for literacy campaigns, math clubs run out of churches and the demographically disproportionate representation of Black Americans as lawyers, doctors, engineers and scientists, and he was one of many figures who helped bind Black Americans to the Liberal Party. [1]
Washington's death did leave a gaping hole in Black leadership in the United States, though, particularly as the ruling Liberals began to ponder how they would approach the question of looming emancipation. "Bookerism," as his proponents and detractors both called it, had been the ascendant point of view not only among Liberal grandees such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, but also increasingly gained currency amongst Democrats, who had historically been less empathetic to Black concerns once north of the Ohio even as they were lockstep in opposition to slavery with the Liberals by 1915. With Washington and his advocacy gone, what would follow was for once an open question.
Conditions in Kentucky suggested something of a Bookerite laboratory, for instance. The tens of thousands of freedmen who had worked their way up there were met by educators, clergy and other humanitarians who made their way into refugee camps. The collapse of civil society in Kentucky and its place as a holding area for escaped slaves until the United States could decide what to do with them meant that in many places, freedmen filled those gaps. In war-ravaged towns like Paducah, or Louisville, or Bowling Green, it was suddenly Black faces that appeared when one asked for a grocer, or a clerk at the courthouse, or even policemen or in some cases doctors. Rapid, on-the-fly education for new roles made western Kentucky in particular something of a Black Mecca, a place where they rapidly stepped into new roles and jobs while some could still even barely read. As the war was now well to their south and Irregulars thus had to operate even further south - the United States Army marched on Little Rock at the same time that Washington's funeral was held in Philadelphia, for instance - Kentucky started to show the green shoots of what a postbellum Black-run society could look like, and Bookerite thinking seemed to have been validated and confirmed.
The "Kentucky System" was, however, not mappable more broadly for two reasons. The first was that it was ascendant in a very small area - occupied Kentucky west of Frankfort and north of Lexington - and was not visible to the millions of Blacks both free and in bondage who were further South, often moved even further South by force as the war entered its final, horrifying year. That it was concentrated in a small area that had been in American hands since mid-1914 by-and-large, and where Irregulars and the Home Guard did not operate, and was the focii of an admittedly small minority of Blacks while tens of thousands of others rotted in squalid camps dotted across Kentucky and west-central Tennessee, made it a decidedly minority experience that few were able to really see in action.
The other was that with Washington's death, more radical voices in the Union were now the decisive figures of Black thought, men like William Monroe Trotter or WEB DuBois, whose Niagara Movement had already been ascendant and whose "National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons" was founded in early 1915 as a pressure organization that looked more broadly than mere abolition, which was by now an almost entirely mainstream and uncontroversial view in the United States' political class. While the NAACP was practically incrementalist, if not counter-revolutionary and reactionary, by the standards of the true radicals that were emerging south of the Ohio River during 1916, it nonetheless advocated a considerably more robust program than Washington's plead for schools and colleges to educate Black men into white society, advocating for the dismantling of the white supremacist superstructure of the Confederate States as the end-game of the war above simply abolition and advocating for the civil rights of not only Black men and women but also Natives, Chinese and immigrants.
Booker Washington was dead, and with his death, the movement he had embodied for nearly thirty-five years rapidly began to pass him by before his body was even in the ground..."
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] I forget who, but somebody suggested to me that an interesting take in this TL would be Black Americans largely becoming the "model minority" in the US, particularly since they're in such smaller numbers, and I definitely want to run with that. It was happening IOTL at one point before stuff like the Tulsa Massacre and freeways got run through prosperous enterprising Black neighborhoods
