I attended Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, Florida, so I've always paid attention to anything about the man that crossed my desk.
The popular/academic assessment has been that Booker T. was an Uncle Tom willing to settle for what the white man would tolerate, while his contemporary W.E.B. Dubois was a righteous civil rights warrior.
My friends over at the excellent blog Rock, Paper, Dynamite have a nice piece aiming at rehabilitating Booker T. and showing that Dubois and he weren't polar opposites.
Sometimes, we cook up roles for historical figures because we want to prove a particular point or tell a certain story. It looks as if Booker T. has been the victim of those who wanted to tarnish his halo, while polishing Dubois'.
4 comments:
They had Dubois motives.
The original Sowell (et al.) essay is good as far as it goes. But Washington's famous Atlanta Exposition speech intimated that Blacks should chill on political civil rights until they had built up economically. DuBois, the first Black Ph.D. in Harvard's history, was already where Washington wanted Black America to be, and so saw political rights as the logical and timely next step. Here was where the split between the two began.
Neat analysis, Tom.
Thanks, Jay. I've done some reading up on this pivotal moment in American history, and so will post more on it presently.
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