Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois

There are, perhaps, few leaders of the early push for African-American advancement that are at once more respected and more controversial than Booker T. Washington. Often identified as the last great leader of African-Americans who was born into slavery, Washington's contributions to the black community are unaparalleled. As one who pushed for the self-directed educational and economic improvement of his people, Washington would be responsible for an adoption of pride and self-determination amongst early equal rights advocates. However, he also pushed for this strategy in contrast to the more militant actions of desegregationists, a position which would also make him the subject of hostility for more militants strands of the movement. Of these more militant strands, W.E.B. Dubois was certainly a leading figure. It is thus that his text, "Of Booker T. Washington and Others," offers a pragmatic view on what he perceived as both the admirable and objectionable traits of Washington.

It is with this balance of respect and disagreement that drives the Dubois text and helps us to understand the shifting winds in what would ultimately become the civil rights movement. To this point, Dubois notes that "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." (Dubois, p. 1)

This is an explicit recognition of the absolutely critical self-directed advancement sought for his people by Washington but it is also tempered by concern over some of the practical measures taken by the leader of men. For Dubois, Washington's influence is a powerful and positive force, not just because of the content of his actions but also because he emerged from slavery to achieve them. However, the author also expresses a great deal of concern over the idea that African-Americans should passively accept segregation and Jim Crow until such time as it was more possible to disrupt these long-ingrained conditions.

Indeed, Washington's efforts at the advancement of his people were cast as a direct counterpoint to the militant action of Marcus Garvey's followers and other hardline desegregationists. To Washington, the black man was simply in the process of earning his equality through hard-won collective advancement. In this altogether different approach to the problems experienced by the black man in America, Washington's was a more conciliatory mode aimed at the political rationality of whites. In one such plain, Washington would argue, "in all discussion and legislation bearing upon the presence of the Negro in America, it should be borne in mind that we are dealing with a people who were forced to come here without their consent and in the face of a most earnest protest. This gives the Negro a claim upon your sympathy and generosity that no other race can possess. Besides, though forced from his native land into residence in a country that was not of his choosing, he has earned his right to the title of American citizen by obedience to the law, by patriotism and fidelity, and by the millions which his brawny arms and willing hands have added to the wealth of this country." (Washington, 297)