Such is the teaching of Washingtonian optimism.
And what is the reply of Du Boisian idealism?
The reply is implicit in the very title of Mr. Du Bois’ book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” |Du Boisian Idealism.| “Your method of securing peace, decency, and comfort for our bodies,” say the idealists to Mr. Washington, “implies, even if successful, the degradation and atrophy of our souls.” Mr. Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints, the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate, with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. “Those who dislike amalgamation,” he says, “can best prevent it by helping to raise the negro to such a plane of intelligence and economic independence that he will never stoop to mingle his blood with those who despise him.” Mr. Washington admits to the full the mistakes of the Reconstruction Period—when the negro was made the dominant race in the South—and promises that they shall never be repeated. For Mr. Du Bois the mistake lay in not resolutely carrying through (of course, with greater wisdom and purity of purpose) the Reconstruction policy. He sees no reason why “the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but categorically promised to the freedmen”—should not have been literally realized. In short, while Mr. Washington is an opportunist and a man of action, Mr. Du Bois is a cloistered intransigeant.
But especially does he resent the over-emphasis laid, as he thinks, on manual as opposed to intellectual training. Manual training is good; but without intellectual training it must leave the race on a low and servile level; and Mr. Washington’s “deprecation of institutions of higher learning,” is leading to a “steady withdrawal of aid” from negro universities. The spectacle of a “lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” which raised in Mr. Washington only a pitying smile, seems to Mr. Du Bois heroic and admirable. The “gospel of work and money,” he thinks, “threatens almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”
I have paused in the story of my pilgrimage in order to give a little sketch of two conflicting tendencies, embodied in two remarkable men. Mr. Washington I have called an optimist; but it must not be understood that Mr. Du Bois is wholly a pessimist. He even says in one place: “That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.” But is it? I wish I could share the confidence of either the optimist or the idealist.
[17]. Since writing this, I have heard Mr. Washington make a speech, and now conceive this grin to be partly, at any rate, a habit contracted in the effort to secure perfectly clear enunciation.
VII
A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK
In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read.
Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own place. (This protestation of impartiality I found to be the constant exordium of such a tirade.) But he was simply stating a matter of incontrovertible fact when he said that there was no nigger that would not assault a white woman whenever he saw a chance of doing so with impunity.