At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute, repeatedly argued that African Americans’ most urgent post‑Reconstruction need was a secure economic footing—land, skilled work, savings, and business ownership—because dependence left Black communities vulnerable to political disfranchisement and racial violence. The quotation reflects Washington’s characteristic “industrial education” program: training in trades and practical disciplines as a route to self-support and community stability. In speeches and essays around the turn of the twentieth century, he often framed economic independence as the prerequisite that could make education effective, give political rights practical force, and allow religious life to flourish without the distortions of poverty and dependency.

Washington’s sentence stacks three pillars—education, politics, and religion—and insists that each rests on a more basic foundation: economic independence. The claim is not that money replaces learning, citizenship, or faith, but that without material security those higher goods become fragile or merely symbolic. For Washington, a people who can earn, own, and manage resources can better fund schools, resist coercion, and practice religion with dignity rather than desperation. The phrase “for our race” situates the argument within the specific constraints of Jim Crow America, where structural exclusion made economic self-reliance a strategy for survival and gradual advancement, even as critics faulted Washington for underemphasizing direct political agitation.