"The Art of the Possible is a new study of the ideas and achievements of Booker T. Washington, the most influential African-American leader of the period 1881-1915. There is now widespread recognition by historians that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was the culmination of complex, long-term developments dating back to the turn of the century.

The decades after 1880 brought profound changes to African-American society as a result of the onset of racial segregation, industrialization, and urban growth. Exploring the leadership of Booker T. Washington in these years, The Art of the Possible discusses topics such as Washington's complex public and private responses to segregation, the reasons for his opposition to black urban migration, and includes a comparison of Washington's philosophy with the ideas and initiatives of other leading African Americans of his era, including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey.

Combined with contextual narrative and historiographical sections, the reader is given a clear, detailed, and holistic overview of black history from the end of Reconstruction to the mid-1920s."--BOOK JACKET.