Negotiating the Veil: Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington Monument.

The design of the Booker T. Washington Monument, also known as Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, sculpted by Charles Keck and dedicated at Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, in April 1922, was the result of occasionally testy negotiations between racially segregated factions. During the monument's negotiated creation, the statue served as a proxy Washington on the campus at a critical moment in the debate over the future of racial uplift in the struggle for civil rights, part of a larger discussion about the place of blacks in U.S. society in the early 20th century. The completed monument repudiated Washington's chief antagonist, W. E. B. Du Bois, a vocal proponent for radical black politics, by implying, through the central image of “lifting the veil,” that a Washingtonian view of progress remained the most appropriate way to empowerment for the black race.

Daugherty, Ellen. “Negotiating the Veil.” American art / 24, no. 3 (2010): 52–77.