W.E.B. DuBois Counters Booker T. Washington, 1903
W.E.B. DuBois,
a black scholar (PhD, Harvard) who grew up in the North and who helped
to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
in 1909, wrote the following essay in his book The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903.
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 . . . . In other periods of intensified prejudice all the
Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a
policy of submission is advocated. In
the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such
crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses,
and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for
it, are not worth civilizing.
In answer
to this, 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. The question
then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make
effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights,
made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing
their exceptional men? If history and
reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No.
And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of
his career:
- He is striving nobly to make
Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible,
under modern competitive methods, for working-men and property-owners to defend
their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.
- He insists on thrift and
self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic
inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long
run.
- He advocates common-school and
industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher-learning; but
neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day
were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates . . . .
. . . Such men feel in conscience bound to ask
of this nation three things:
- The right to vote.
- Civil equality
- The education of youth
according to ability.