The philosophies of W.E.B. Dubois and Washington are more different than alike. Washington and Dubois both preach about the uprising of the American Negro, what is the American Negro, –an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
But Dubois and Washington also have different viewpoints at what this American Negro should do, or how he can become educated and successful with or without using the white man. At this point, the Nation has not yet found peace from its sins and the freedman has not yet found in freedom his Promised Land.
These two men have very dissimilar ways of thinking. They both feel that the American Negro should be successful, but they (the American Negro), should do this in different ways. Mr. Washingtons program consisted of, industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights.
This startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves. Washington stated in the Atlanta Compromise that, In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five finger, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. The radicals acknowledged it as a give up or surrender of the demand for political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis for common understanding. Washington arose as essentially the leader not of one race but two, –a compromise between the South, the North, and the Negro. Mr. Washington plan was to distinctly ask that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,
First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,
And concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. As a result in these years there have occurred:
- The disfranchisement of the Negro.
- The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
- The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.
Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, make a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No, (www.bartleby.com/114/3.html, 5).
Dubois thought differently, he felt that we should have the right to vote, civic equality, and the education of youth according to ability. When sticks and stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms, — a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion (3).
These men are comparable in some ways also. They both agree on the uprising of the American Negro. They both felt that, Dubois insisted, the way to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticizing uncompromisingly those who so ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand, and urging their fellows to do the samesame time in remembering that only firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility, (6). Blacks did not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; to see bias and prejudices of the years go away at a sound of a horn.
But they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their practical rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away, but by insisting that they do not want them. The way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist on issues that are bothering them persistently, in season and out of season (6-7). They fought for what they believed in and never gave up on the dream not to become one with the white man, but to become one with himself and his own environment.
