Historical Beefs #6: W.E.B. versus Booker T

[Professor Emeritus]

I approach this different than previous beefs. W.E.B. DuBois been a hero since my youth, and so Booker T. Washington had to be the bad guy. Now that I know better I see that life is more complex than that, so I tried to endow this beef with the respect for both legends that they deserve.

So this gonna be long.

Tale of the Tape

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856 and never knew his daddy. In 1865 he and his mama got the hell out of the South for West Virginia. Little Booker T desperately wanted to learn but opportunities for black folk weren't shyt, so he worked the salt furnaces and coal mines.

After seven years of that shyt he heard about Hampton and decided he would do anything to get there. Penniless at 16, Booker T left home and trekked 500 miles, sleeping under wooden sidewalks and hustling just to make it. Arriving weeks later, he proved his worth as a janitor and was allowed to stay on a work-study basis. He eventually became an instructor there, so beloved that its president once said,

"If Hampton had trained no other student in the seven years of its existence, the one now coming to the platform would justify all the costs and the sacrifices entailed by its founders.”

When some White folk wanted a White man to start a school for Black people in Alabama, General Armstrong sent them 25yo Booker T instead. He told those fools that Booker T was the finest student he'd ever had and no White man would be able to do it better. Booker T worked with his students to build the Tuskegee Institute from scratch, putting up the buildings, running the grounds and hustling the funding themselves, until they were training thousands of Black persons in academics and work skills.

At Tuskegee Booker T had to play three games at once – convince Southern Whites that educated Black people were an asset, convince Northern Whites that funding Black education was worthwhile, and convince Black folk that education and vocational training would be the key to their own self-sufficiency. By all accounts he was a master politician, and soon had a huge following.

If there was one thing Booker T wanted to fight for, it was for Black men to have access to the training that would allow them to make an honest living.

At Hampton I found the opportunity—in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the generous—to get training in the classroom and by practical touch with industrial life, to learn thrift, economy, and push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to have awakened every faculty in me, and caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.

W.E.B. DuBois might as well have been from a different planet. Born in 1868 in a 99% White town in Massachusetts to a free Black mama who hadn't known slavery for generations, he had the support of his teachers, becoming not only the first Black man to graduate from the high school but also the valedictorian. His daddy left when he was young and his mama died when he was 16, but W.E.B.'s childhood church raised the funds for him to attend college at Fisk in Tennessee, where he first encountered Jim Crow racism in a fuller form. From there he went on to Harvard and became the first Black man to earn a Harvard Ph.D.

After graduation W.E.B. wrote to Booker T about working at Tuskegee, but Booker T's offer came too late and W.E.B agreed to teach at Wilberforce U instead. Soon he left and spent a year in Philly to make the first-ever case study of a Black community in the USA.

If there was one thing W.E.B. wanted to fight for, it was for a Black men to have the rights to reach their full potential in American society.

He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

How the beef started

The background to this shyt was the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow laws across the South. By the time Booker T was graduating from Hampton and W.E.B. was attending Fisk, segregation was set. It had once seemed like the fight for freedom had been won with the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But White Supremacy had wrest back control in the South, shyt was going backwards, and disappointment was setting in. True freedom appeared to be a much longer battle.

For 14 years Booker T built up Tuskegee Institute in relative obscurity, only leaving to raise funds. He developed a large, supportive following, but wasn't a public figure until 1895, when at the age of 39 he was asked to give a speech at the Atlanta Exposition.

Booker T's speech ended up being a damn event. Thunderous applause, reported in newspapers around the country, all that shyt. The noise it created obscure what was really a moderate statement. Booker T basically said:

1. Black people are essential to the future of the nation
2. For Black people to succeed, they need to learn a skill/profession and earn a living – everything else is secondary to the first step of earning a wage by your own hands.
3. White people should welcome and trust Black labor
4. Anything that stifles Black education or Black labor will only stifle the country
5. Social equality ain’t happening anytime soon and can’t be forced, it will only happen after a lot of hard work and once free Black people have proven that they are indispensable.

The most quoted line from the speech is, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Some folk took that as an acceptance of segregation, though his closing line was: “let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law.”

The White response to the speech was – newspaper editors called it among the most notable speeches ever given in the South. Even President Grover Cleveland gave Booker T his props, resulting in a meeting between them and a friendship that lasted years and led to the president’s support for Tuskegee.

Black folk's reaction was positive-to-mixed. W.E.B. started positive, he sent personal congrats to Booker T and said the speech "might be the basis of a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South, if the South opened to the Negroes the doors of economic opportunity and the Negroes co-operated with the white South in political sympathy.”

Even today, Ta-Nehisi Coates takes a positive view:

It makes sense, when you think about it. Washington basically said to the white South in 1895,“You win. We don’t want the right to vote. We just want to till our farms, better ourselves, and be left alone. Leave us in peace, and you’ll hear no more of this voting or integration business.” You have to remember the state of mind of black people, at that time. Reconstruction had been rolled back. The South was wracked by race riots. Three years after Washington’s speech, the only coup in American history was orchestrated in Wilmington, North Carolina by racist thugs. Washington was basically conceding what he'd already lost. In return he hoped to simply secure the right of good Christian blacks to work the land in peace.”

With the national platform Atlanta gave him, Booker T promoted his school in the pages of The Atlantic:

Most of all, we find the industrial system valuable in teaching economy, thrift, and the dignity of labor, and in giving moral backbone to students. The fact that a student goes out into the world conscious of his power to build a house or a wagon, or to make a harness, gives him a certain confidence and moral independence that he would not possess without such training.

He encouraged Black people to get an education, develop an income, get out of debt, buy land. While all of these things had practical benefit, something deeper was possible too:

This is another reason why at Tuskegee we push the industrial training. We find that as every year we put into a Southern community colored men who can start a brick-yard, a sawmill, a tin-shop, or a printing-office, — men who produce something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the negro, instead of all the dependence being on the other side, — a change takes place in the relations of the races.

Let us go on for a few more years knitting our business and industrial relations into those of the white man, till a black man gets a mortgage on a white man’s house that he can foreclose at will. The white man on whose house the mortgage rests will not try to prevent that negro from voting when he goes to the polls. It is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights. Whether he will or not, a white man respects a negro who owns a two-story brick house.

Under the table Booker T was secretly funding Black civil rights work and initiatives to get the vote back for Black people. But that work was too controversial, especially to Southern White people, that he felt public knowledge of it could threaten his work. So in public he only promoted the accommodationist view.

After the initial positive feelings about Booker T's speech passed, some of the Black community began to think different about what he was saying, and among some liberals and intellectuals came the feeling that he was too conciliatory towards White people and it was time to fight for full social rights.

The first sign that W.E.B. was turning on Booker T came in 1897. At just 29 W.E.B. was becoming known as America’s foremost Black intellectual, and he could get his bars into The Atlantic’s pages too.

(breh, you trying to shave a W into your dome? )

W.E.B. argued that simply earning money while being subservient in White society was not enough – for to be fully human the Black race needed fullness of work, culture, AND liberty:

The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense, and as a guarantee of good faith. We may misuse it, but we can scarce do worse in this respect than our whilom masters. Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek — the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think. Work, culture, and liberty—all these we need, not singly, but together; for today these ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race, — the ideal of fostering the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack.

In 1898 W.E.B. took over leadership of the American Negro Academy, a pro-academia group opposed to Booker T's focus on industrial education. Booker T in turn resigned from the board of the Kawaliga Academy, which had been founded by a friend of W.E.B., and clapped back on W.E.B with another article in The Atlantic.

The Negro in the South has it within his power, if he properly utilizes the forces at hand, to make of himself such a valuable factor in the life of the South that for the most part he need not seek privileges, but they will be conferred upon him. To bring this about, the Negro must begin at the bottom and lay a sure foundation, and not be lured by any temptation into trying to rise on a false footing. While the Negro is laying this foundation, he will need help and sympathy and justice from the law. Progress by any other method will be but temporary and superficial, and the end of it will be worse than the beginning.

The man who has learned to do something better than any one else, has learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner, has power and influence which no adverse surroundings can take from him. It is better to show a man how to make a place for himself than to put him in one that some one else has made for him. The Negro who can make himself so conspicuous as a successful farmer, a large tax-payer, a wise helper of his fellow men, as to be placed in a position of trust and honor by natural selection, whether the position be political or not, is a hundred-fold more secure in that position than one placed there by mere outside force or pressure.

But I may be asked, Would you confine the Negro to agriculture, mechanics, the domestic arts. etc.? Not at all; but just now and for a number of years the stress should be laid along the lines that I have mentioned. We shall need and must have many teachers and ministers, some doctors and lawyers and statesmen, but these professional men will have a constituency or a foundation from which to draw support just in proportion as the race prospers along the economic lines that I have pointed out.

They weren't polar opposites - Booker T fought for equity, arguing that voting rights should be conferred without discrimination. And he even gave a shout-out to W.E.B.:

The Negro should be taught that material development is not an ends but merely a means to an end. As Professor W. E. B. Du Bois puts it, the idea should not be simply to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men.

W.E.B. wasn’t opposed to a truce of sorts – in 1899 he spoke at a fundraiser for Tuskegee, and he and Booker T partly co-organized the "Negro exhibition" at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

But in 1900 the two men clashed over several bureaucratic issues, and then Booker T's autobiography, Up From Slavery, was published, which doubled-down on the conciliatory language.

My own belief is, although I have never before said so in so many words, that the time will come when the Negro in the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to. I think, though, that the opportunity to freely exercise such political rights will not come in any large degree through outside or artificial forcing, but will be accorded to the Negro by the Southern white people themselves, and that they will protect him in the exercise of those rights. Just as soon as the South gets over the old feeling that it is being forced by "foreigners," or "aliens," to do something which it does not want to do, I believe that the change in the direction that I have indicated is going to begin. In fact, there are indications that it is already beginning in a slight degree.

You read Up From Slavery and I gotta be honest, it didn't age well.

Between the lines Booker T is making you aware of all the ways that White people tried to impede his work, but he keeps saying such damn nice things about Southern White people. You figure he has street cred, and the politician in him just kissing White people's ass to manipulate them into doing what he wants, "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar". But the book is hard to read knowing what many of those Southerners were really like.


W.E.B. couldn't handle it. He published a critical-ass review of Up From Slavery, and even though both sides attempted to minimize their public separation, their beef was set.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The Ether moment

Booker T’s influence was now enormous. He had become the first Black man to be awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard and moved on from Grover Cleveland to become President Teddy Roosevelt’s adviser on Black issues.

Racists went when Booker T became the first Black man to have an official private dinner at the White House.

But W.E.B. felt Booker T was betraying his own, even though he knew that was not his intention. Plessy vs. Ferguson had made “separate but equal” constitutional, and though the justices didn’t refer to Booker T’s speech, W.E.B. came to believe that “separate as the fingers of the hand” gave cover to the justices’ decision.

In 1902 W.E.B. clapped back with some of his most pointed criticism yet:

We have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And men ask this today all the more eagerly because of the sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.

He wasn’t done. In 1903 W.E.B. published The Souls of Black Folk. I first read it damn near 100 years after he set his soul to paper, but the words are still live.

Read the first four paragraphs of Chapter 1, "Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it..."

Beyond the gorgeous language and unparalleled depth and clarity of thought, he gave Booker T the business. The third chapter is titled, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”. W.E.B. starts soft, noting how impressive it is for a man from Booker T's following to have accomplished all he has.

Mr. Washington's cult has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. Today he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as of his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well in the world.

Walking the lines that Booker T has had to walk in the South is a balancing act, but.....W.E.B. still digs the fukk in.

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens.

It has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—

First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.

This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.

I am not sure that W.E.B.’s criticism was fair. But W.E.B. felt that Booker T had grown too powerful and no one could be beyond criticism. In the closing paragraphs, he admits that Booker T has fought racism, but insists it was not enough and looks for a different way forward:

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts...

..His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy" alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?

...so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The Souls of Black Folk is an American classic, its prose continues to impress and the issues raised have yet to be resolved. And in the middle of a classic piece of literature, W.E.B. landed a takedown that became the "political bible" of many educated Blacks in the North.

Booker T's supporters went out in force, putting negative portrayals of W.E.B. into newspapers and demanding that Atlanta University shut up their "sociology professor".

But the mold was set.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

From then on there were two ways

Now there was a struggle for the heart of Black leadership, with Booker T at the head of one and W.E.B. at the head of the other.

Later that year Booker T was supposed to speak at a church in Boston in support of the National Negro Business League. The speech was rowdily interrupted by William Trotter, the de facto leader of the "Negro Radicals", a group of Northern Blacks who opposed Booker T's program. Trotter was, uh, less diplomatic.

In view of the fact that you are understood to be unwilling to insist upon the Negro having his every right (both civil and political) would it not be a calamity at this juncture to make you our leader? . . . Is the rope and the torch all the race is to get under your leadership?

Everyone started yelling, the meeting descended into chaos, someone threw pepper bombs and stink bombs , and Trotter was arrested by the police. W.E.B. wasn't there, but later he came out in support of Trotter's side, and (false) whispers started that W.E.B. had helped plan the whole thing.


The riot and its aftermath embittered Booker T to the Radical cause, and his statements afterwards were condescending and dismissive. Newspapers supporting Booker T and newspapers supporting the Radicals engaged in all-out war. W.E.B. and Booker T tried at first to keep the sides from destroying each other, then basically said, "fukk it" and went all-in with their factions.

In July 1905 W.E.B. and Trotter held a meeting at Niagara Falls to create a group that would oppose segregation and disenfranchisement while rejecting Booker T's approaches, and the Niagara Movement was born. Booker T got his forces together and suppressed news about the Niagara Movement in the Black press, and what they did write was salty as hell.

The devastating Atlanta Race Riots of 1906 then decreased Booker T's popularity, as they convinced many Black people that Southern Whites were never going to do anything but bullshyt no matter what White people did. W.E.B. was in Atlanta during the riots, "I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot. If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass."

Despite his weakened position, Booker T's suppression was successful and the Niagara Movement began to die. But another race riot in Illinois in 1908 renewed interest in anyone that would fight for civil rights, and W.E.B. got the remainder of the Niagara Movement behind a new group he co-founded called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP.

In 1911, Booker T said,

(you really need to tighten up that fade g)

Dr. DuBois pursues the policy of stirring up strife between white people and black people. This would not be so bad, if after stirring up strife between white and black people in the South, he would live in the South and be brave enough to face conditions which his unwise course has helped to bring about; but instead of doing that he flees to the North and leaves the rank and file of colored people in the South no better off because of the unwise course which he and others like him have pursued.

Sadly, in the end both sides moved towards disappointment.

Booker T advised President Hayes, but Hayes continued to support Jim Crow laws anyway. W.E.B. and the radicals put their support behind Woodrow Wilson and elicited a promise from him that he would work on Black issues. Wilson's victory in 1912 killed Booker T's influence in the White House...but Wilson backstabbed W.E.B. and segregated the government in D.C. without doing shyt for Black people.

Booker T continued to run Tuskegee and its vast network but had seen little improvement in the attitudes of Southern Whites towards Black people. He died of hypertension in 1915, potentially in part due to the incredible workload he imposed on himself.

The NAACP under DuBois and company kept the spotlight on lynching, won significant legal battles for Black rights here and there, but the race riots that destroyed Black communities after World War I seemed to counter any sense of progress. W.E.B became disillusioned and turned more and more towards the global Black diaspora at the expense of particular American issues. In the 1950s he decided he was done with America altogether and renounced his citizenship to go to Ghana.

W.E.B. DuBois died in Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95. The next day, MLK Jr. marched on Washington.

Late in his life, W.E.B. lamented and defended his beef with Booker T, moving blame a bit.

The controversy developed more between our followers than between us. It is my opinion that Washington died a sad and disillusioned man who felt he had been betrayed by white America. I don't know that, but I believe it. In the early years I did not dissent entirely from Washington's program. I was sure that out of his own background he saw the Negro's problem from its lowest economic level. He never really repudiated the higher ends of justice which were then denied.

I realized the need for what Washington was doing. Yet it seemed to me he was giving up essential ground that would be hard to win back. I don't think Washington saw this until the last years of his life. He kept hoping. But before he died he must have known that he and his hopes had been rejected and that he had, without so intending, helped make stronger -- and more fiercely defended -- a separation and rejection that made a mockery of all he had hoped and dreamed. I felt grief for him when I learned of his death because I believe he died in sorrow and a sense of betrayal.

And then this poignant statement six months before his death.

"I never thought Washington was a bad man," he said. "I believed him to be sincere, though wrong. He and I came from different backgrounds. I was born free. Washington was born slave. He felt the lash of an overseer across his back. I was born in Massachusetts, he on a slave plantation in the South. My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution." (This earned the grandfather his freedom.) "I had a happy childhood and had acceptance in the community. Washington's childhood was hard. I had many more advantages: Fisk University, Harvard, graduate years in Europe. Washington had little formal schooling. I admired much about him. Washington," he said, a smile softening the severe, gaunt lines of his face, "died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time."

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

i'll check this out tonight.

 

[storyteller]

My favorite one you've done so far. Informative AF and worth sharing.

 

[gldnone913]

Sub

 

[Worthless Loser]

Thanks for this. W.E.B was just called a c00n in TLR by one of the militants last night so I've spent last night looking more into him.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Thanks for this. W.E.B was just called a c00n in TLR by one of the militants last night so I've spent last night looking more into him.

You have to go way deep into alternative history to come up with that narrative. His entire program was that Black people needed their full rights here and now and shouldn't have to wait for White people to warm up to them. And I downplayed it in the story cause W.E.B. DuBois downplayed it in his own life (and believed in intergration and anti-racism as the only real way forward, and the best way), but the brother hated white people. I mean, intensely despised them.

He once admitted that he, opposing racial prejudice, was "one of the greatest sinners" in the intensity of his prejudice against white persons. He was honest enough to say that he expected prejudice and therefore may have even caused it by anticipating it. In Darkwater, published in 1920, he concluded a section of verse which condemned "The White World's Vermin and Filth," with the lines:

I hate them, Oh!
I hate them well,
I hate them, Christ!
As I hate hell!
If I were God I'd sound their knell
This day.

Oswald Garrison Villard, who admired DuBois very much and who had worked with him in the NAACP, wrote in 1920 of the personal bitterness "that so often mars his work." In the same year, in a letter to a friend, he said, "I think I pity Dr. DuBois more than any man in America."

W.E.B. Du Bois - 65.11

 

[Secure Da Bag]

@Rhakim Powerful info, breh. Appreciate you putting this out. I have a better understanding of these men and their positions.

But like most of these arguments, it's not either-or, but rather a balanced synergy of both. :final_ti:

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Another great entry

 

[Worthless Loser]

You have to go way deep into alternative history to come up with that narrative. His entire program was that Black people needed their full rights here and now and shouldn't have to wait for White people to warm up to them. And I downplayed it in the story cause W.E.B. DuBois downplayed it in his own life (and believed in intergration and anti-racism as the only real way forward, and the best way), but the brother hated white people. I mean, intensely despised them.



W.E.B. Du Bois - 65.11

Candice Owens exposes the true nature of Planned Parenthood. It used to be called The Negro Project.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Thanks for this. W.E.B was just called a c00n in TLR by one of the militants last night so I've spent last night looking more into him.

figured booker T would be the one TLR hates

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Candice Owens exposes the true nature of Planned Parenthood. It used to be called The Negro Project.

I've seen that dude's posts plenty, I'm pretty sure he trolls on purpose.

W.E.B. DuBois was flirting with eugenics when it was considered respectable science, but he explicitly fought against the racist use of the theory. It was an error of his but it wasn't c00ning.

W.E.B. DuBois's challenge to scientific racism

The Black Politics of Eugenics

The 'science' of eugenics: America's moral detour

 

[Professor Emeritus]

@Rhakim Powerful info, breh. Appreciate you putting this out. I have a better understanding of these men and their positions.

But like most of these arguments, it's not either-or, but rather a balanced synergy of both. :final_ti:

Yep - the reason I call them "legends" and rate them way above a lot of more recent intellectual leaders is cause they both clearly loved their people and spent their entire lives working for the Struggle. Booker T. Washington should be distinguished from a lot of Black "conservatives" that followed him, especially today, because he spent his entire damn life pouring all of himself into helping his people and got tens of thousands of Black people, maybe hundreds of thousands, an education and real life skills. W.E.B. DuBois can be distinguished from a lot of Black "liberals" that followed because he wasn't just talking about equal rights, he was creating and leading movements that fought real battles and won victories in the fight for rights. They weren't just unusually brilliant, they were both unusually devoted to giving their life to the cause.

TBH there wasn't even a need for them to be beefing with each other, they should have just been letting each other cook. The Black community coming out of slavery needed to have someone fighting to get the community educated and endow them with real work skills, and they needed someone leading the fight for equal rights. Both were essential. The beef was mostly born out of ego and myopia - if W.E.B. DuBois could have just realized that Booker T. needed to play both sides to work successfully in the South and didn't blame Washington for the sins of White people, and if Booker T. could have just realized that W.E.B. was capable of making headway in the fight for rights and didn't blame DuBois for antagonizing White people, they could have worked in parallel and never had beef at all.

A good modern equivalent would be charter school leaders and public school proponents. The best examples of both are each working to improve Black education, they need to realize that both of their efforts are essential and stop getting in each other's way.