Washington, Beecher, Kirk?

What it means that these three are honored together.

March 2, 2026

The Department of Education has been getting some attention for hanging this banner:

International Business Times

The three images are of “heroes of American education,” and the criticism has been the incongruity of including Charlie Kirk, a college dropout who made a name for himself by creating a platform for doxxing and harassing academics whose political views he found unpalatable.

My initial, kneejerk reaction was that Kirk does not deserve to be honored alongside Booker T. Washington and… whoever this woman is. The Hill reports on the Department of Education’s rationale for the multistory images, whose very size, and similarity to banners of Trump at the Department of Labor, strikes many as rather proto-fascist. The Hill quotes a spokeswoman:

“We are proud to honor visionary leaders whose contributions have shaped the future of education for generations. Their work reflects Benjamin Franklin’s timeless belief that ‘an investment in knowledge pays the best interest,’” Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Department of Education, told The Hill in a statement.

“As our country marks a historic 250th milestone, this moment invites us all to join in the pursuit of fostering educational opportunity that empowers every learner to rise, contribute, and help shape a brighter future for generations yet to come,” she added.

My considered reaction is that the problem with this is more complex. Both Washington and Catharine Beecher made genuine contributions to American education, and the comparison of the sneering anti-intellectual Kirk to these two is to be sure unwarranted. But Washington and Beecher are notable choices for other reasons, too.

Booker T. Washington was born a slave and went on to become a renowned scientist and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, one of the first of the constellation of Historically Black Colleges and Universities established during Reconstruction and after. He was celebrated in white society, invited to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, and undoubtedly made important contributions to American education and society. But he is also known for a speech dubbed by W. E. B. DuBois the “Atlanta Compromise.” The speech set out an incrementalist path for racial equality:

Washington believed that once it was apparent to whites that blacks would “contribute to the market place of the world,” and be content with living “by the production of our hands,” the barriers of racial inequality and social injustice would begin to erode. Those words were spoken on September 18, 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta, Georgia, known as the Atlanta Exposition. Washington’s speech stressed accommodation rather than resistance to the segregated system under which African Americans lived. He renounced agitation and protest tactics, and urged blacks to subordinate demands for political and equal rights, and concentrate instead on improving job skills and usefulness through manual labor. “Cast down your buckets where you are,” he exhorted his fellow African Americans in the speech.

… However, by the early 1900s, other African Americans, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, were becoming national figures and speaking out about the lack of progress African Americans were making in American society. Du Bois, initially an ally of Washington’s, was particularly vocal about what he believed was Washington’s acceptance of black’s unchanging situation and began to refer to Washington’s Atlanta speech as the “Atlanta Compromise” — a label that remains to this day.

The criticism by Du Bois and others diminished Washington’s stature for some in the black community. They denounced his surrender of civil rights and his stressing of training in crafts, some obsolete, to the neglect of a liberal arts education. Washington’s public position of accommodation to segregation came in conflict with increasing calls from African Americans and liberal whites for more aggressive actions to end discrimination.

Washington’s legacy remains mixed.

Catharine Beecher was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, both prominent abolitionists (Stowe’s famous anti-slavery novel gave us the term “Uncle Tom”). Catharine Beecher was an outspoken advocate for women’s education as well as early childhood education. Her Wikipedia biography states:

In 1841 Beecher published A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, a book that discussed the underestimated importance of women’s roles in society.

… Beecher recognized public schools’ responsibility to influence the moral, physical, and intellectual development of children. She promoted the expansion and development of teacher training programs, holding that teaching was more important to society than lawyers or doctors. Beecher also supported home education. In her textbook A Treatise on Domestic Economy, she pointed out the ‘senselessness of an educated woman doing her own sewing while paying someone else to teach the children instead of farming out the sewing and teaching the children.’

All good so far. Beecher also “believed that women have inherent qualities that make them the preferred gender as teachers.” She wrote extensively about the vital, particular roles women played in building a healthy society. In modern feminist terms, I suppose this would make her an essentialist. And perhaps the belief that men and women have distinct essential natures explains the other role she is remembered for:

Unlike other family members, Beecher opposed women’s suffrage. In The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women and Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Profession (1871), she argued that home and school are such important social forces that women should limit their lives to them. While she did not challenge women’s sphere, she did see their domestic and teaching roles as the source of women’s power and influence.

Both Washington and Beecher no doubt made important contributions to the evolution and improvement of education in the early United States. But both were also, to some degree, accommodationists in regards to their own human rights.

I don’t want to belabor the question of the historical accuracy of this claim – there is probably a reasonable case to be made that I am grievously wrong in my assessment of their commitment to racial and gender equality, respectively. The issue isn’t historical accuracy but historical memory, and in particular, how they are being remembered by the Department of Education when they hoist their banners today.

It matters, I would say, that their portraits were hung next to Kirk’s to complete a triumvirate of “heroes of education.”

Fire me if you will, but the late Charlie Kirk was a racist. Virtually his last words impugned the moral character of Black Americans. His views on the subjugation of women were no less clear.

By hanging a memorial to Washington, Beecher and Kirk, the Administration is sending a fairly clear message about who they take the other two to be, and by lionizing all three in portraits sized to make Mussolini blush, they are sending a message about who they consider heroic, what kind of activism they consider to be acceptable, and by extension, the racial and gender hierarchies they consider to be proper and just.

Charlie Kirk was a mediocre, anti-education bigot. Real-life Washington and Beecher may have been true heroes of education, imperfect as all heroes are. Poster Washington and Beecher are anything but.