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W.E. B. DuBois and the Talented Tenth
Professor Gregory B. Padgett
As a young man educated in a segregated school system in the fifties, I recall that certain
individuals were presented by my teachers as role models. James Weldon Johnson, a native of
my home town of Jacksonville, Florida was always touted for his achievements in the arts,
education and civil rights. Johnson had founded and served as principal of the city’s first black
high school. He was the first African-American admitted to the Florida bar. Poet, educator,
lawyer and song writer, Johnson was a renaissance man who excelled in all of his endeavors.
Despite these achievements, Johnson was not given the mythic status accorded W.E.B. DuBois.
DuBois was always presented as the most accomplished African-American of the twentieth
century, the model of the scholar as social activist. Booker T. Washington was never given the
same status by my teachers. His biography was presented as an example of the triumph of the
human spirit but not a model for personal growth. My teachers found his program of
accommodation to white racism problematic.
Their attitude is the result of a very old tradition among African-Americans of direct challenge
to racial oppression. Indeed, historian Robert Brisbane asserts that there have been five major
protest movements among African-Americans between 1795 and 1970. These periods are:
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The Post-Revolutionary War Protest, 1795-1815
The Militant Anti-Slavery Movement, 1831-1850
Post Reconstruction Separatism and Emigrationism, 1876-1896
The Era of Marcus Garvey, 1916-1930
Civil Right Movement/Black Revolution, 1955-1970
Brisbane states that “Protests and protest movements among black people in the United States
against varying forms and degrees of white racism are as old as the nation itself. (Brisbane,
Black Activism, p.11). Booker T. Washington’s program of accommodation and program of
vocational education (1896-1915) lies in one the fifteen to twenty year gaps that separate each
of the protest movements. DuBois refers to some of these protest movements in your assigned
reading on pages 28 and 29. The Souls of Black Folks was a refutation of the social Darwinism
and pseudo-scientific publications of the era that depicted African-Americans as inferior.
DuBois was very concerned that many whites made no distinction between well-educated
African-Americans and those still struggling with the residual effect of slavery. (W.E.B. DuBois,
Biography of a Race 1868-1919, David Levering Lewis, vol. 1, p.279) Few whites recognized the
diversity that existed within the African-American population.
The essay entitled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” is a critique of the program of
industrial education Washington advocated. The concern of DuBois and other AfricanAmerican leaders was that conditions for blacks had steadily deteriorated since Washington’s
installation as the primary spokesman of the race. Washington’s conciliatory stance had the
opposite effect of what he intended.
Between 1889 and 1932, 3,745 people were lynched in America. Most of the victims were
black men. (The Negro Year Book 1931-1932, p.293) Many black leaders felt Washington’s
program invited ridicule and abuse. Edward H. Morris an African-American philosopher with
degrees from Harvard and Yale stated in a newspaper interview that “Washington was largely
responsible for the lynching in this country”. Prior to the publication of The Souls of Black Folks
in 1903 Dubois had distanced himself from Washington’s more extreme critics. Foremost
among this group was his close friend and fellow Harvard alum, William Monroe Trotter.
Trotter was the editor of the African-American newspaper, the Boston Guardian.
In editorials in his paper, Trotter called Washington, “The Great Traitor”, “The Benedict Arnold
of the Negro Race” and “Pope Washington”. After, Trotter served a thirty day sentence for
disrupting a meeting of the Boston chapter of the National Negro Business League, held July 30,
1903, DuBois’ attitude towards Washington changed. He disapproved of Trotter’s behavior but
felt Washington should have intervened to prevent Trotter’s jail sentence. (Lewis, pp.301-302).
Instead, Washington did all he could to undermine Trotter’s newspaper. He financed three rival
black newspapers in Boston which failed. (Lewis, p.301). The problem for Washington’s
contemporaries and many succeeding generations of African-Americans was that he was not
chosen by his own people. (Souls of Black Folk, p.30). Whites conferred the mantle of
leadership upon him after his speech to a segregated audience at the opening of the Cotton
States International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895. The speech was
telegraphed to every major newspaper in America. Washington’s speech received an
enthusiastic reception from whites across the nation and some African-Americans. Even DuBois
sent a congratulatory telegram six days after the speech. Later, he would refer to the address
as the “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Lewis Harlan the author of the most definitive biography
of Washington states that the intent was to illustrate the common interests and grounds for
cooperation shared by the two races for their mutual progress. He was careful to reassure
whites that his approach did not threaten racial segregation legalized by the Supreme Court
decision in Plessey v. Ferguson (1896). He said, “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.”
Some African-American leaders were outraged by the speech. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of
the AME Church said, “Washington will have to live a long time to undo the harm he has done
to the race.” Washington developed relationships with the wealthiest and most prominent
men of the era. William H. Baldwin, vice president of the Southern Railroad was chair of the
Board of Trustees of Tuskegee Institute. Washington and his organization became the conduit
through which all philanthropic funds flowed to black institutions of higher learning. Men like
Andrew Carnegie, Julius Rosenwald and Rockefeller consulted with Washington before making
any contributions to black schools. This allowed him to propagate his program of agricultural
and mechanical arts for blacks. Schools with liberal arts curriculums received very little. There
was an attempt to starve colleges like Atlanta, Fisk and Lincoln out of existence, while the
endowments of vocational schools like Tuskegee and Hampton Institute in Virginia became so
large they were among the richest in the country. Hampton in 1925 had an endowment of $8.5
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million, seventeenth in the nation. Washington’s influence also extended into the political
arena where he advised white politicians on matters involving African-Americans.
It is ironic that Washington became so politically influential while advising blacks to avoid
politics. In 1896 he supported William McKinley, the Republican candidate for president over
William Jennings Bryan and developed a close friendship with his successor, Theodore
Roosevelt. In 1901, Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House. White
southern newspaper denounced Washington for this severe breach of racial etiquette since the
rules of segregation blacks did not dine according with whites. Roosevelt ignored them and a
few days later he had dinner with Washington at Yale University but he never invited the
president of Tuskegee to the White House again. At Washington’s behest Roosevelt appointed
William D. Crum, a black physician as collector of customs of the port of Charleston, South
Carolina. South Carolina senator Benjamin R. Tilman who was an avowed racist delayed the
appointment for three years. Charles W. Anderson, an associate of Washington orchestrated
an appointment of James Weldon Johnson who spoke Spanish and French fluently as consul to
Puerto Cabello, Venezuela in 1906.
Booker T. Washington was a complex person. He engaged in activities that his white patrons
would have found objectionable. He secretly financed an unsuccessful case contesting
Louisiana’s "grandfather clause” which denied blacks the right to vote. Practically every
southern state had a similar law. The law passed in 1898 stipulated that only men who had
been eligible to vote before 1867 or whose father or grandfather been eligible before that year
could vote. Practically no African-American male was eligible to vote before that date. (DuBois
refers to this on page 29) The impact on black voting was profound. In Louisiana the number of
black men on the voting rolls dropped from 130,000 in 1896 to 1, 342 in 1904. Washington also
financed similar cases in Alabama. DuBois was apparently aware of his rival’s activities. (Souls,
p.34). But, Washington unlike DuBois was unwilling to publicly oppose white supremacy.
The Souls of Black Folk served as the formal manifesto of the “Talented Tenth.” DuBois
introduces the concept in essay six. According to DuBois the educated elite should uplift their
disadvantaged brothers. (Lewis, pp. 288-289) The book was a critical and commercial success.
The printer, A.C. McClurg and Company had three printing runs in 1903. Two-hundred copies
were sold weekly. (Lewis, p. 291) A British edition was printed in 1905. It was a stunning
success despite Washington’s efforts to suppress recognition of the book in the black press.
Southern white newspapers universally condemned the book. Northern newspapers and
magazines reviews were shaped by their level of support for white supremacy and
Washington’s program. The New York Evening Post and the Nation both newspapers owned by
Oswald Garrison Villard (grandson of abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison) published favorable
reviews. Despite this support many whites avoided overt criticism of Washington, but Villard
did print an unsigned editorial questioning the idea that the Tuskegee program was a panacea
for America’s racial problems. (Lewis, p.295)
Dubois went on the offensive against the “Tuskegee Machine” after publication of the book. In
1905, DuBois convened a meeting with twenty-nine delegates in the Canadian side of Niagara
Falls. This was the start of the Niagara Movement, which eventually had four-hundred
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members. The organization was dedicated to the destruction of segregation and racial
discrimination in America. Washington always sought to destroy any threat to his program and
Tuskegee Institute. He sent his agents to spy on the Niagara Movement and if possible infiltrate
the membership. (Hine, The African-American Odyssey, p.371)
Washington used his
considerable financial resources in his efforts to discredit the Niagara Movement. The
organization was actually destroyed from within, DuBois and Trotter had serious disagreements
over the direction of the organization and by 1908 it had collapsed.
The following year the NAACP was founded. DuBois, Oswald Garrison Villard, social workers,
Lillian Wald and Jane Addams, literary scholar Joel E. Spingarn and attorneys Clarence Darrow
and Moorfield Storey, and two African-American women Ida Wells Barnett and Mary Church
Terrell. Washington launched a sustained campaign in the black press opposing the NAACP. It
was unsuccessful and by the time of his death in 1915, the NAACP had six-thousand members
and fifty branches.
Dubois became director of publicity and research and editor of the Crisis, the official magazine
of the organization. By 1913, it had thirty–thousand subscribers ten times the membership of
the NAACP. By 1913, Washington’s influence had waned. The decline was the result of a single
incident two years earlier. On March 19, 1911, Washington was assaulted in front of a boarding
house on West 63rd Street in New York City’s tough San Juan Hill neighborhood. The street was
occupied by high class prostitutes. Washington sustained a gash on his head requiring sixteen
stitches in a fight with a young German-American, Henry Ulrich. Washington was arrested
when Ulrich accused him of accosting his wife. He was later released when police learned his
identity. It was determined that the woman involved was not married to Ulrich. The reason for
Washington being at such a location far from his upscale hotel is still debated by historians.
DuBois, then a resident of New York garnered the details from neighborhood residents that he
considered reliable. Their account was that Washington had visited that address on previous
trips to the city to utilize the services of the white prostitutes who lived and worked there.
(Lewis, p.431) Ulrich attacked Washington because he had a personal relationship with the
woman visited that evening.
Notably, both the white and black press declined to print the most lurid details of the incident.
Lewis writes that, “If they failed to give him the benefit of the doubt, then the South’s white
leaders would be destroying their most useful creation.” He quoted an editorial in the
Lynchburg News which stated, “Anything likely to seriously impair Booker Washington’s
usefulness as a conservative influence among Negroes… would furnish cause for profound
regret.” (Lewis, p.432) Even William Monroe Trotter who had an intense dislike for Washington
refused to attack him openly.
Washington’s white patrons quietly distanced themselves from him and the incident and illness
hampered his activity in the remaining years of his life. The contest over the nature of AfricanAmerican education did not end with Washington’s death. In 1916, the U.S. Bureau of
Education and the Phelps Stokes Fund published a 725 page report on African-American
education mandating vocational training for blacks and endorsing the white South’s disapproval
of liberal art curricula for African-American colleges. David Levering Lewis in his book on the
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Harlem Renaissance noted that only Washington’s death and the First World War hindered the
imposition of the anti-liberal arts policy. (See Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue) After the war
DuBois led the movement to protect black liberal art colleges. He also fought racism on
northern college campuses, including the attempt by Harvard president Lawrence Lowell to ban
black students from the residence dorms in 1922. Unfortunately Lowell’s enrollment quota for
Jewish students was successful.
The generation of African-American men and women who were recipients of a liberal arts
education would provide the leadership for the civil rights movement that transformed
American society. As he grew older DuBois became more radical, he moved from integration,
to Black Nationalism and finally communism. In 1951 he was arrested for attending a left wing
peace conference in Paris. He was tried by the Justice Department for failing to register as an
agent of a foreign entity within the U.S. ( U.S. v. Peace Information Center) He was deeply hurt
by how quickly prominent black and whites in the country deserted him. The banquet for his
eighty-third birthday was cancelled after his arrest. Many were cautious in the McCarthy era
about being identified as radicals or communist. Ultimately, DuBois was acquitted but he lost
his passport for eight years. (Lewis, vol. 2, p.554) DuBois’ opposition to the Korean War and
U.S. cold war policy had isolated him from American black leadership. DuBois left for Ghana in
1961, he was ninety-three. His influence on the civil rights movement and the Black Nationalist
movement that followed is undeniable and that leadership role began with the publication of
The Souls of Black Folks. Despite the problems posed by DuBois’ radicalism late in life, his
legacy continues to inspire. DuBois died in Ghana in 1963 on the day of the historic March on
Washington.
Sources: W.E.B. DuBois, Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, W.E.B. DuBois, The Fight For Equality And The
American Century, 1919-19 by David Levering Lewis; When Harlem was in Vogue by David Levering
Lewis; The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois; The African-American Odyssey vol. 2 by Darlene Clark
Hine
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