{"id":1508,"date":"2015-08-20T06:06:21","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T06:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/americanyawphist118x15x1\/?post_type=chapter&p=1508"},"modified":"2015-08-20T06:06:21","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T06:06:21","slug":"jim-crow-and-african-american-life-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/sanjacinto-atdcoursereview-ushistory2-1\/chapter\/jim-crow-and-african-american-life-2\/","title":{"raw":"Jim Crow and African American Life","rendered":"Jim Crow and African American Life"},"content":{"raw":"Just as reformers advocated for business regulations, anti-trust laws, environmental protections, women\u2019s rights, and urban health campaigns, so too did many push for racial legislation in the American South. America\u2019s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. In fact, in all to many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther from American public life.\r\n\r\nIn the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of \u201cnegro domination\u201d and of black men violating white women. The region\u2019s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened to the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms\u2014disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would \u201cpurify\u201d the ballot box by restricting black voting and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the South movement were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of a shared Anglo-Saxon, white supremacy. As the nation took up the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d to uplift the world\u2019s racially inferior peoples, the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage non-white populations. The South had become the nation\u2019s racial vanguard.\r\n\r\nThe question was how to accomplish disfranchisement. The 15th<\/sup> Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890 the state of Mississippi took on this legal challenge. A state newspaper called on politicians to devise \u201csome legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies.\u201d The state\u2019s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. Those hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding the state\u2019s African American population from political power. The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped the suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state\u2019s African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so called \u201cunderstanding clause\u201d allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud.\r\n\r\nBetween 1895 and 1908 the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed the suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded would still be eligible, at least until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an all-white primary, excluded blacks from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that mattered across much of the South.\r\n\r\nFor all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later Governor of Mississippi, boasted \u201cthere is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi\u2019s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ignorant\u2014but the nigger.\u201d These technically colorblind tools did their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only 5,320 voted in 1900. Blacks were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying in order to prevent the fraud that had plagued the region\u2019s elections.\r\n\r\nAt the same time that the South\u2019s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region\u2019s black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white and black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local community\u2019s racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence. The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region\u2019s railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of southern blacks. Southern cities were becoming a center of black middle class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of blacks into the very geography of public spaces.\r\n\r\nAs with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the constitution\u2014in this case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases <\/i>(1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states. It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy challenged the constitutionality of Louisiana\u2019s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities were legal provided they were equivalent. In practice this was rarely the case. The court\u2019s majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. \u201cIf one race be inferior to the other socially,\u201d the court explained, \u201cthe Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.\u201d Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, countered, \u201cour Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law\u201d Harlan went on to warn that the court\u2019s decision would \u201cpermit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.\u201d In their rush to fulfill Harlan\u2019s prophecy, southern whites codified and enforced the segregation of public spaces.\r\n\r\nSegregation was built on a fiction\u2014that there could be a white South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of \u201cseparate but equal.\u201d Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected black citizenship and relegated black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region\u2019s growing black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between black and white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, many black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as activists such as Ida Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of black Americans.\r\n\r\nBorn into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute. Located in Alabama, Washington envisioned Tuskegee\u2019s contribution to black life to come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans too accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_861\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"500\"]\"Booker<\/a> The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, \u201cWASHINGTON BOOKER T,\u201d between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nAs a leading spokesperson for black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass\u2019s exit from the historical stage in early 1895, Washington\u2019s famous \u201cAtlanta Compromise\u201d speech from that same year encouraged black Americans to \u201ccast your bucket down\u201d to improve life\u2019s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court\u2019s Plessy <\/i>v. Ferguson <\/i>decision that legalized segregation under the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, \u201cIn 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.\u201d Both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America\u2019s unjust racial hierarchy, Washington\u2019s public advocacy of a conciliatory posture towards white supremacy concealed the efforts to which Washington went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery\u00a0<\/i>(1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in black journalism, working to fund and support black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois\u2019s growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.\r\n\r\nSpeaking decades later, W.E.B. DuBois said Washington had, in his 1895 \u201cCompromise\u201d speech, \u201cimplicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.\u201d Du Bois would directly attack Washington in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk<\/i>, but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival. \u201cI admired much about him,\u201d Du Bois admitted, \u201cWashington . . . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.\u201d\r\n\r\nDu Bois\u2019s criticism reveals the politicized context of the black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. Raised by a hardworking and independent mother, Du Bois\u2019s New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois\u2019s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life\u2019s work to study what he called the \u201cNegro problem,\u201d the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the <\/i>problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois\u2019s educational path trended back North, and he attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard and in 1895\u2014the same year as Washington\u2019s famous Atlanta address\u2014became the first black American to receive a Ph.D. there.\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_859\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"500\"]\"W.E.B.<\/a> \u201cW.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,\u201d 1919. Library of Congress, http:\/\/www.loc.gov\/pictures\/item\/2003681451\/.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nDu Bois became one of America\u2019s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois\u2019s work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia, but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk<\/i> (1903) and Darkwater<\/i> (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate black personhood and<\/i> attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois\u2019s main work with the NAACP lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis<\/i>, one of America\u2019s leading black publications. DuBois attacked Washington and urged black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.\r\n
\r\n
\u201cWe refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults\u2026 Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice \u2026 discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed \u2026 Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.\u201d\r\n

\u2014<\/span>W.E.B. DuBois<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div><\/blockquote>\r\nW. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a notable historical legacy. Reared in different settings, early life experiences and even personal temperaments oriented both leader\u2019s lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois\u2019s confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date. Although Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter \u201cOf Mr. Booker T. Washington\u201d in Souls of Black Folk<\/i>, four years later in 1907 they shared the same lectern at Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American South. As much as the philosophies of Du Bois and Washington diverged when their lives overlapped, highlighting their respective quests for racial and economic justice demonstrates the importance of understanding the multiple strategies used to demand that America live up to its democratic creed.","rendered":"

Just as reformers advocated for business regulations, anti-trust laws, environmental protections, women\u2019s rights, and urban health campaigns, so too did many push for racial legislation in the American South. America\u2019s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. In fact, in all to many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther from American public life.<\/p>\n

In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of \u201cnegro domination\u201d and of black men violating white women. The region\u2019s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened to the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms\u2014disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would \u201cpurify\u201d the ballot box by restricting black voting and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the South movement were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of a shared Anglo-Saxon, white supremacy. As the nation took up the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d to uplift the world\u2019s racially inferior peoples, the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage non-white populations. The South had become the nation\u2019s racial vanguard.<\/p>\n

The question was how to accomplish disfranchisement. The 15th<\/sup> Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890 the state of Mississippi took on this legal challenge. A state newspaper called on politicians to devise \u201csome legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies.\u201d The state\u2019s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. Those hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding the state\u2019s African American population from political power. The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped the suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state\u2019s African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so called \u201cunderstanding clause\u201d allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud.<\/p>\n

Between 1895 and 1908 the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed the suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded would still be eligible, at least until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an all-white primary, excluded blacks from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that mattered across much of the South.<\/p>\n

For all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later Governor of Mississippi, boasted \u201cthere is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi\u2019s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ignorant\u2014but the nigger.\u201d These technically colorblind tools did their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only 5,320 voted in 1900. Blacks were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying in order to prevent the fraud that had plagued the region\u2019s elections.<\/p>\n

At the same time that the South\u2019s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region\u2019s black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white and black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local community\u2019s racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence. The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region\u2019s railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of southern blacks. Southern cities were becoming a center of black middle class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of blacks into the very geography of public spaces.<\/p>\n

As with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the constitution\u2014in this case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases <\/i>(1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states. It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy challenged the constitutionality of Louisiana\u2019s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities were legal provided they were equivalent. In practice this was rarely the case. The court\u2019s majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. \u201cIf one race be inferior to the other socially,\u201d the court explained, \u201cthe Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.\u201d Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, countered, \u201cour Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law\u201d Harlan went on to warn that the court\u2019s decision would \u201cpermit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.\u201d In their rush to fulfill Harlan\u2019s prophecy, southern whites codified and enforced the segregation of public spaces.<\/p>\n

Segregation was built on a fiction\u2014that there could be a white South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of \u201cseparate but equal.\u201d Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected black citizenship and relegated black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region\u2019s growing black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between black and white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.<\/p>\n

And yet, many black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as activists such as Ida Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of black Americans.<\/p>\n

Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute. Located in Alabama, Washington envisioned Tuskegee\u2019s contribution to black life to come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans too accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Booker<\/a><\/p>\n

The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, \u201cWASHINGTON BOOKER T,\u201d between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As a leading spokesperson for black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass\u2019s exit from the historical stage in early 1895, Washington\u2019s famous \u201cAtlanta Compromise\u201d speech from that same year encouraged black Americans to \u201ccast your bucket down\u201d to improve life\u2019s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court\u2019s Plessy <\/i>v. Ferguson <\/i>decision that legalized segregation under the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, \u201cIn 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.\u201d Both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America\u2019s unjust racial hierarchy, Washington\u2019s public advocacy of a conciliatory posture towards white supremacy concealed the efforts to which Washington went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery\u00a0<\/i>(1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in black journalism, working to fund and support black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois\u2019s growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.<\/p>\n

Speaking decades later, W.E.B. DuBois said Washington had, in his 1895 \u201cCompromise\u201d speech, \u201cimplicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.\u201d Du Bois would directly attack Washington in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk<\/i>, but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival. \u201cI admired much about him,\u201d Du Bois admitted, \u201cWashington . . . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Du Bois\u2019s criticism reveals the politicized context of the black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. Raised by a hardworking and independent mother, Du Bois\u2019s New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois\u2019s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life\u2019s work to study what he called the \u201cNegro problem,\u201d the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the <\/i>problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois\u2019s educational path trended back North, and he attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard and in 1895\u2014the same year as Washington\u2019s famous Atlanta address\u2014became the first black American to receive a Ph.D. there.<\/p>\n

\n
\"W.E.B.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cW.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,\u201d 1919. Library of Congress, http:\/\/www.loc.gov\/pictures\/item\/2003681451\/.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Du Bois became one of America\u2019s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois\u2019s work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia, but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk<\/i> (1903) and Darkwater<\/i> (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate black personhood and<\/i> attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois\u2019s main work with the NAACP lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis<\/i>, one of America\u2019s leading black publications. DuBois attacked Washington and urged black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.<\/p>\n

\n
\u201cWe refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults\u2026 Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice \u2026 discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed \u2026 Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/span>W.E.B. DuBois<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a notable historical legacy. Reared in different settings, early life experiences and even personal temperaments oriented both leader\u2019s lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois\u2019s confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date. Although Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter \u201cOf Mr. Booker T. Washington\u201d in Souls of Black Folk<\/i>, four years later in 1907 they shared the same lectern at Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American South. As much as the philosophies of Du Bois and Washington diverged when their lives overlapped, highlighting their respective quests for racial and economic justice demonstrates the importance of understanding the multiple strategies used to demand that America live up to its democratic creed.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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