By Ronald Court
For two years, I’ve debated with myself over whether to tackle the 800 pound gorilla in the room whenever anyone seems to mention Booker T. Washington. That is, the prevalent but faulty belief in academia that BTW was inferior to WEB Du Bois. I had concluded that, as Booker T. himself was too busy leading, uplifting and accomplishing to debate WEB in person, neither should I. Until now.
Booker T. died too young and early, leaving a vacuum that WEB never would have filled had BTW lived. Instead, WEB’s bitter world-view went largely unchallenged for the better part of a century so that many who claim to know and teach American History today simply reject Booker T. Washington as a “compromiser,” “accommodationist” “wizard” or head of the “Tuskegee machine.”
Let these teachers and students, mired in WEB Du Bois’s deeply, profusely written feelings of alienation and anger, lift the veil of ignorance from their own eyes.
Let them first rid themselves of the false notion that Booker T. campaigned against Du Bois. No, Du Bois plotted against BTW in forming the short-lived Niagara Movement as well as enlisting others to obtain “every scrap of evidence” to use against BTW.
The archives in The W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass quote WEB writing of “another and more bitter controversy. This started with the rise at Tuskegee Institute, and centering around Booker T. Washington, of what I may call the Tuskegee Machine.”
So Du Bois coins a disparaging term to describe BTW’s effectiveness and historians who should know better parrot it and thus become complicit in besmirching BTW’s good name. It is dishonest.
Further, Web disingenuously writes, “There came a controversy between myself and Booker T. Washington, which became more personal and bitter than I had ever dreamed.”
Really? What an interesting way to acknowledge an issue while implicitly disavowing responsibility. It ranks right up there with today’s currently politically popular, “mistakes were made” and “absent any controlling legal authority…”
Two-time BTW biographer Louis Harlan is hard put to find evidence that BTW entertained personal or bitter thoughts towards WEB. But that didn’t stop him from characterizing BTW as “devious” or labeling his speeches as “banal” and “hackneyed”. I’ve posted several speeches here. Judge for yourself.
I’ll say it again: BTW was too busy doing good to bother much with WEB… with one exception: Washington secretly financed Du Bois and others to challenge Jim Crow in the courts. Does that seem “personal and bitter” to you?
BTW was, however, not without fault. I believe Stephen Mansfield gets it right in his bio,
“Then Darkness Fled” The liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington:
“It is necessary to acknowledge what is true in the charges against him. It is true that Washington entrusted the future of his race to the goodness of America and was betrayed. He felt this himself all too keenly in the closing years of his life. Washington taught his people to invest in America for a harvest of respect, equality and prosperity. They received instead the Jim Crow fruits of a racist land…
It is true also that Washington misunderstood the nature of racial prejudice. He assumed that those who hated his people did so because of who his people were, either because they were black or poor or illiterate or uncultured. In other words, he assumed that racial hatred was rational. Therefore, if he could change what his people were, he could remove the object of white hatred.
The truth is, … racial hatred is irrational. It is simply hatred for the sake of hatred and rarely has any reasonableness about it… there is often little the hated can do to assuage the hatred against them… In 1915, it seemed that Washington, who believed in whites more than whites believed in themselves, had simply been deceived.”
Today however, is much different than 1915. Impediments to equality – at least as a matter of written law – are no longer, so anger and alienation no longer serves the purpose they may have “back in the day.” Today, they have become simply impediments to further progress. Du Bois no longer has a tenable solution to the problem of the color line. Rather, Washington’s approach, properly understood and updated in today’s context, is far more promising.
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A Blessing in Disguise
September 17th, 2007By Ronald Court
I’ve been off-line for over a week – ever since my computer’s hard drive crashed. With computer and back-up software off to a Geek Squad for repair and reconstruction, I was “stuck” with time on my hands, and voilà, my disaster turned into a blessing in disguise.
I opted to catch up on my reading. First up was “1776″ David McCullough’s account of General George Washington’s 1st year in the Revolutionary War. Defeat followed defeat until Washington launched a “brilliant stroke” and changed history, though the war raged for another six and a half years, taking 1% of our population. In percentage terms, it was “the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.”
McCullough closes with, “Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning–how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference–the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.”
Amen. This inspiring read gave me pause to ponder how the history of our country as it is being written today will turn out–will circumstances or “strengths of character” make the difference? Only time will tell.
It is little short of a miracle to me that our country, born in a bloody revolution, dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and still struggling to make it so, would produce not one, but two leaders who shared such ‘strengths of character’ and much more.
Consider two men separated by time, yet: both born on tobacco farms, both Virginians, both self-educated, both spending their earlier years working the same West Virginia land (one a surveyor, the other at salt & coal mines) both receiving honorary degrees from Harvard, both with a brother named John and both with the surname, Washington. (and here’s a stretch: both had a wife whose 1st name was “Mar…”)
To be sure, one was born into slavery, the other into slave-holding. However, my sense is we, all of us, stand to benefit more by choosing to embrace and emulate the qualities common to these two great Americans? Not because or in spite of the color of either, but because both were great leaders, period.
(Thank you, son Barnaby for the “1776″ Christmas present I have finally come to more fully appreciate.)
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