W. E. B. Du Bois · Politics
Against the most powerful Black leader of his age, Du Bois argued that accepting second-class citizenship in exchange for economic crumbs was a fatal bargain - and that the race needed full rights, higher education, and its ‘Talented Tenth.’
At the turn of the twentieth century, the undisputed leader of Black America was Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most powerful Black man in the country. In 1895, at the Atlanta Exposition, Washington delivered a speech that became known as the ‘Atlanta Compromise’ and made him the favored spokesman of white philanthropists and politicians alike. His message: that Black Southerners should, for now, set aside the struggle for social equality and the vote, concentrate on industrial and vocational training, prove their economic usefulness, and patiently earn white respect through work. Agitation for civil and political rights, Washington implied, was folly; in all things purely social, the races could remain as separate as the fingers of a hand.
Du Bois, a generation younger, at first respected Washington. But he came to see the compromise as a catastrophe - a surrender that traded the dignity and the future of an entire people for the hope of economic toleration. In The Souls of Black Folk he devoted a full chapter, ‘Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,’ to a careful, respectful, devastating critique. The disagreement between these two men became the central argument of Black American political thought for a generation - a debate about strategy, dignity, and what a subjugated people owes to itself and its future.
Du Bois pressed his critique with cold logic. Washington asked Black Americans to give up three things, at least for the present: the right to vote, civic equality, and the higher education of their youth. And what, Du Bois asked, had this triple sacrifice actually produced in the years since the Atlanta speech? Not respect and gradual acceptance, but the opposite: the legal disfranchisement of Black voters across the South, the hardening of segregation into law, and the steady withdrawal of support for any Black education above the vocational. Washington’s policy of conciliation had coincided with - and, Du Bois charged, had helped to legitimize - the worst deterioration in Black civil status since slavery.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Du Bois broke with Washington over whether Black Americans should accept disfranchisement and segregation in exchange for economic progress. In your own words, lay out both positions and explain why Du Bois thought Washington’s bargain was self-defeating.
Leads to John Stuart Mill.
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