In a former chapter I showed how the Negroes of the country are divided into two parties or points of view, the greater led by Booker T. Washington, the lesser by W. E. B. DuBois. Washington’s party is the party of the opportunist and optimist, which deals with the world as it is: it is a constructive, practical, cheerful party. It emphasises duties rather than rights. Dr. DuBois’s party, on the other hand, represents the critical point of view. It is idealistic and pessimistic: a party of agitation, emphasising rights rather than duties.
But these two points of view are by no means peculiar to Negroes: they divide all human thought; and the action and reaction between them is the mode of human progress.
Division of White Leadership in the South
White leadership in the South, then, is divided along similar lines with Negro leadership—a party of rights and a party of duties. But with this wide difference: among the Negroes as I showed, the party of agitation and criticism led by DuBois is far inferior both numerically and in influence to the party of opportunity and duties led by Washington. For the Negroes have been forced to concede the futility of trying to progress by political action and legislation, by rights specified but not earned. Washington’s preaching has been:
“Stop thinking about your rights and get down to work. Get yourself right and the world will be all right.”
But among the white people of the South the party of agitation and the emphasis of rights rather than duties is still far in the ascendency. Led by such men as Tillman, Vardaman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others, it controls, for the present, the policies of the entire South. It has much to say of the rights of the white man, very little about his duties. It is, indeed, doing for the whites by agitation and legislation (often a kind of force) exactly what Dr. DuBois would like to do for the Negro, if he could.
“Agitate, object, fight,” say both Tillman and DuBois.
“Work,” says Washington.
Now, the same logic of circumstances which produced Booker T. Washington and his significant movement among the Negroes has produced a group of new and highly able white leaders. These new leaders saw that agitation (while most necessary in its place) would not, after all, build up the South; they saw that although the sort of leader typified by Tillman and Vardaman was passing laws and winning elections, he was not, after all, getting anywhere; that race feeling was growing more bitter, often to the injury of Southern prosperty; that progress is not built upon stump speeches. The answer to all this was plain enough.
“Let us stop talking, forget the race problem, and get to work. It does not matter where we take hold, but let us go to work.”