DuBois was Right, but Washington Had a Point

Last updated on: October 21, 2016 at 6:36 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

DuBois was Right, but Washington Had a Point 2016-10-21T18:36:45-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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W.E.B. DuBois inspires me to do my job: educate students classically for leadership in Houston, Texas, and the United States. His work reminds me that there is a “talented tenth” that needs what we are offering and much of what puts a student in that tenth is desire. Students cannot do whatever they want academically, but they can do more than most of us think. He understood that most of us do not wish to be leaders and it is the ten percent who do the work that helps the ninety percent. He wanted the best education for African-Americans coming up from slavery and he wanted it now.

Another great thing about W.E.B. DuBois is that his genius, his writing, his passion is not directed to me. He was intent on helping the oppressed people of color over the whole globe. When I learn from DuBois, I learn as a secondary beneficiary of his genius and that is a good and humbling position.

He was right and yet something is missing. I honor W.E.B. DuBois for what his writings teach me, but cannot go where he went. For understandable reasons, he rejected Christianity and so rejected a large bit of truth. His atheism made him susceptible to the blandishments of some of the worst people in human history. He minimized the valuable cultural, artistic, and civil rights role of the African-American church.

In this sense, there were thinkers like Booker T. Washington who got more right, though educationally they got important things wrong.

Good men can do great things, but be wrong. Booker T. Washington is just such a person. Born into slavery, conquering ignorance imposed on him from the outside, Washington helped thousands of freed people. He advocated letting white people retain political power while African-Americans gained the economic and educational status to become full citizens.

The great intellectual growth of Washington should have told him that he was pressing for too little. If he was capable of doing all he had done, he underestimated what the freed men and women could do. Yet practically, he ennobled manual labor and his emphasis on character was vital to a group of people that (as Frederick Douglass pointed out in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass) had been corrupted morally by slavers to keep people enslaved.

DuBois was right to push for classical education and sometimes said that the trades were not bad, but his idea of a talented tenth tended to denigrate the trades. He failed to see that classical educated persons need practical skills. Washington’s ally, Theodore Roosevelt, showed this truth by combining manual labor with classical education in his own highly privileged life. DuBois became captive to the endless controversies of intellectuals as he scrapped for control of organizations, journals, and intellectual programs.

In that sense, Washington may have done more by leaving the nation the invaluable Tuskegee Institution. DuBois was right to press for voting rights and world-class education for people of color all over the world, but he too often drifted into supporting bad causes. DuBois wrote an effusive eulogy for Stalin, one of the worst rulers in human history, who killed tens of millions of his own people. There is no excuse for this and we dishonor DuBois by refusing to hold him responsible. He knew Stalin was a tyrant and yet refused to recognize that he was one the very few people in human history who was the moral equivalent of Hitler. This was an egregious error, but it is hard to judge a man too harshly warped by living in a country where the government enforced Jim Crow.

At the same time, Washington risked being used by a white power establishment to justify the continuation of white political power, especially in the South. White philanthropists and politicians (like Theodore Roosevelt) may have used him . . . as he used them to support Tuskegee. Some of the compromises that were made look bad a century later.

History is complicated!

Booker T. Washington understood that character counts and taught this truth (imperfectly) at Tuskegee. DuBois knew that classical education was necessary for some and should be open to all children . . . including African-Americans. Washington valued manual labor and made sure his school taught trade skills (including nursing!). DuBois had a strong emphasis on learning many languages as a pathway to power.

Both were right and both (I think) were wrong, but who am I to judge? Mostly, I have learned from both educators. My classical soul is nourished by DuBois and my Christian worker side by Washington. Together they make one great mentor! Like all great writers, perhaps it is best for me to be still and listen to their arguments with each other and learn.

Can one school combine classical, character, linguistic, trade education? Can we? If we can, then we will have learned by sitting at the feet of two brilliant American originals: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

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