Decision Fifteen: Booker T. Washington v. WEB Dubois

• • In the late nineteenth century, a robust debate emerged concerning the strategy that African Americans should take towards improving their conditions. The two most notable representatives of these strategies were Booker T. Washington and WEB Dubois.

  • Booker T. Washington was a realist. He made a case for reasonable, gradual, and peaceful means of advancements. He argued that a kingdom cannot be built overnight. He focused on the realities of the condition of blacks: largely uneducated, without skills, and poor. He argued that the journey forward had to go one step at a time. For Washington, it was a not reasonable to think that ex-slaves could become wealthy elites without doing so gradually. He also believed that segregation would be best for blacks. As such, he started the Tuskegee University in Alabama for teaching blacks practical steps for improving their lives.

  • WEB Dubois felt that Booker T. was a sell-out. He criticized him for not demanding more and expecting major changes fast. Dubois was a Harvard professor who admired John Brown for his ideals and call to radical action. DuBois believed that Washington was not giving blacks good advice by telling them to learn trades. He wanted them to reach higher and become doctors, lawyers, even politicians.

• BOOKER SAID

As we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch...

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.

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.

• WEB Dubois' response

Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens; 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, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disenfranchisement 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.

DECISION: You are a black American in 1895. Whose advice do you follow and why?

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