Transcription
What's a black man got to do to get ahead in this country?
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois were two of the most important leaders of the black community during the late 19th and early 20th century. But don't think these leaders worked hand-in-hand like Adams and Jefferson, MLK and Malcolm X, Professor X and Magneto. Their ideas were often opposing, if not adversarial, to each other.
Take Booker T. Washington. Born into slavery, freed by the 13th Amendment, initially self-taught, he would go on to co-found the Tuskegee Institute. That would train African-Americans in agriculture and industry and help promote their economic progress. This soon put Washington on the national stage, and many would come, both black and white, to hear him speak. It even resulted in him becoming the first African-American invited to the White House.
Now, W.E.B. Du Bois, on the other hand, was born after the Civil War in Massachusetts. Educated in integrated schools, he would first experience true Jim Crow when he attended the historically black Fisk University in Tennessee. Now, this isn't to say that the North was a bastion of tolerance, as seen at Harvard, where Du Bois would eventually get his doctorate, the first African-American to do so. Despite the fact that Harvard refused to accept his fifth degree or let him stay on campus after 6 p.m.
Du Bois went on to publish many works on the current and future state of African-Americans and even co-founded the NAACP.
So why do Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois matter? Washington and Du Bois both had their own plans for how blacks should achieve success in America. Washington proposed that African-Americans' primary concern should be achieving independence through learning trades. Addressed in what's known as his Atlanta Compromise speech, he urged blacks to postpone battles for equal political rights and instead focus on economic security. He advocated for the temporary allowance of segregation and admittedly lower political status for blacks that would ideally lead to peaceful acceptance in American society. While this position might be seen as pragmatic, especially in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South, to many it reeked of accommodation.
And W.E.B. Du Bois was certainly in that camp. He felt that submission to any denial of rights was unacceptable. He felt that civil rights and higher education were critically important to the success of African-Americans and spoke of "The Talented Tenth," a small segment of the black population that would lead the way to true political, social, and economic equality. Addressing the advancement of African-Americans and Washington's philosophies, Du Bois would say this: "That the way for people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves, and that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them."
And that is why Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois matter.
Now, considering the time period, who do you side with? The pragmatic and perhaps accommodating Booker T. Washington, or the idealistic and perhaps radical W.E.B. Du Bois? Let me know in the comments. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. Be safe, and I'll see you next time.