The African American Intellectual Experience

ADAPTED FROM ESSAYS BY JONATHAN HOLLOWAY,
YALE UNIVERSITY

An intellectual tradition may span many different kinds of inquiry and reveal itself in many different forms of expression. The scientist, artist, writer, teacher, musician, politician, inventor, minister, and even the criminal can be intellectuals, involved in society or detached from it, leaders, followers, or merely uninterested.

The variety of intellectual expression becomes crucial when we consider the history of African American intellectuals, because racial discrimination often limited their career options and compelled them to unite their creative and political activities. In other words, the particular realities of life for Africans in the Americas gave rise to a very specific intellectual tradition—and very specific types of intellectual leaders. There are a number of primary threads woven through the African American intellectual experience; many of which have their roots in the experience of being uprooted from the African continent and the legacy of bondage and search for freedom. The drive for literacy, the search for identity and the right to shape one's own narrative or history, the poetics of exclusion—these are some of the primary tenets of the literature and ideas grown up out of the African American community in the United States.

While a central and often-times nearly desperate need for self-definition—and the economic and civil rights that should follow—has marked much of the intellectual experience of African Americans, their "outsider" status and history of disenfranchisement also drove many African Americans to extraordinary heights—extremes of intellectual and artistic achievement. We can only hope that as American history is written, the story will reflect more and more the traditions that African Americans create and perpetuate, and the central role of these ideas in the fabric of the American experience.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL EXPERIENCE

The history of African American intellectuals begins with the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784). Born in Africa, Wheatley was brought to the United States and purchased by a prominent Boston family. She did not have a "typical" slave experience. Her owners taught her to read and write—skills she mastered with amazing speed. Wheatley dined with her owners and had her own room in the family house. Moreover, when she began to suffer from ill health, the family followed its doctor's advice and sent her to England to recuperate. Along with providing safe passage, Wheatley's owners released her from bondage.

Wheatley's masters were atypical in yet another way. In 1773, they helped her become the first African American to publish a book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, but not before they had proved to skeptical publishers that an African slave had the mental capacity to write poetry in the grand English tradition. Indeed, the Wheatleys had to secure written verification of their slave's talents from the governor and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Other prominent Bostonians, like John Hancock (1737-1793), also provided support.

The other colonial African American most often cited for his intellectual abilities is the astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806). Born into a Maryland family of freed slaves, Banneker spent most of his life tending the family farm, educating himself in his spare time from borrowed books. He attending school with white and African American children. On the tobacco farm he inherited from his parents, he spent his nights studying the stars.

It was not until Banneker was sixty years old that he began to gain widespread recognition for his abilities. In 1791, he started working on an almanac that incorporated his calculations for solar and lunar eclipses. In the same year, he was chosen to assist in the survey of the Federal Territory, now known as the District of Columbia. After he completed this task, he returned to the family farm and turned his full attention to securing publication of his almanac. Prior to its publication, he sent a copy to slave owner Thomas Jefferson, who was the secretary of state at the time. Banneker produced the almanac for only six years, but the project was quite successful, coming out in twenty-nine separate editions in the United States and England.

Although Banneker was a scientist and Wheatley a poet, these two figures have several important things in common. They both lived most of their lives prior to the Revolutionary War, thus demonstrating that an African American intellectual tradition predates the founding of the United States. Moreover, although they were popular, both were seen as racial oddities by their white contemporaries, who were amazed that a black person could possess the talent needed to write sparkling poetry or compute challenging mathematical formulas.

Perhaps most importantly, neither Wheatley nor Banneker made a career out of agitating for racial progress, a fact that sets them apart from the African American intellectual tradition they helped to establish, which has been characterized by vigorous protest and activist leadership. Did these two early African American intellectuals have an obligation to protest more vigorously against slavery and other forms of social inequality based upon race? Perhaps it was enough that both were masters of their crafts and that, through their mastery, they offered early proof that African Americans were capable of anything.

THE RISE OF THE PREACHER-ACTIVIST: HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET

By 1807, both Wheatley and Banneker had passed away. But their deaths did not spell the end of African American intellectual endeavors. Indeed, this country's early national period was a fertile time for the development of a new type of African American intellectual: the preacher-activist.

It is not surprising that most black intellectuals of the nineteenth century also happened to be religious leaders. After all, preachers often were literate, adept at verbal analysis, and committed to trying to improve the lives of those around them. The rise of abolitionism also played a role in the growing leadership of the African American preacher-activist. Based in church organizations and founded upon Christian belief, the abolitionist movement was in many ways a religious movement, and as it took root in the decades preceding the Civil War, several religious leaders (black as well as white) were catapulted into the spotlight.

Many African American preachers rose to intellectual leadership during the abolitionist era, men like J. W. C Pennington (1809-1875) and Samuel Ringgold Ward. One of the most famous of these spiritual leaders was Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882). Garnet was born into slavery but gained his own emancipation when he joined his father in an escape to New York City. He received a first-rate theological education and, upon completion of his studies, secured a pastorship in upstate New York, but he was not content to focus solely upon his congregation. Knowing from personal experience the horrors of slavery, he became an outspoken advocate of armed slave resistance. In his 1843 "Address to the Slaves of the United States," delivered at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, Garnet advised,"You had better all die—die immediately, than live slaves and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity."

Accompanying Garnet's call for aggressive self-emancipation was a philosophy imbued with religious sentiment instructing African Americans how to live their lives. This philosophy is most clearly expressed in Garnet's essay "The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race," in which he asks,"How shall we acquit ourselves on the field where the great battle is to be fought? By following after peace and temperance, industry and frugality, and love to God and to all men, and by resisting tyranny in the name of Eternal Justice."SEE PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENT "The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race," by Henry Highland Garnet

SLAVE, FUGITIVE, ABOLITIONIST, AND LEADER: FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The fight against slavery also propelled fugitive slaves into national prominence, none more famous thanFrederick Douglass (1817-1895), perhaps the greatest intellectual leader of the nineteenth century. Like Garnet, Douglass had escaped slavery and was to become a figure in the abolitionist movement. Douglass provides an interesting perspective on the intellectual leader as scholar and political activist. Unlike Garnet, or the African American leaders of the late twentieth century who as often as not have come from a religious back-round, Douglass was an orator and a manipulator of the political machine. While the two men were different in ways too numerous to count, it might be said Booker T. Washington came out of this tradition. Savvy, an educator and public speaker, Frederick Douglass used the national platform of race and politics, along with the success of his own autobiography to wield considerable clout with various figures in government. Douglass also created a name for himself as a newspaperman, editing and publishing such important periodicals as> the North Star, Frederick Douglass's Paper, and the New National Era. More than any American before him, Douglass filled the role of public intellectual. He devoted his considerable capacities to explicitly political ends, and by so doing paved the way for future generations of African American intellectuals who would do the same.

THE 1890s: DEBATE AND DIVISION AMONG BLACK INTELLECTUALS

The 1890s were an era of profound transition for African American intellectuals. Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American leader, died in 1895. In the same year, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), destined to be the most influential African American intellectual of the twentieth century, received his Ph.D., the first black to receive a doctorate from Harvard University. Also in 1895, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) delivered his "Atlanta compromise" address at the Cotton States and International Exposition, hastening his ascent to national prominence.

A slave until the age of nine, Washington toiled in coal mines as a youth but eventually secured admission to the Hampton Institute of Virginia, where he worked his way through school. Several years after his graduation, Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (1881). The "Tuskegee mission" was to train teachers and workers, and this it succeeded in doing, but only with steady financial assistance from major white corporate philanthropies. Washington was able to secure such assistance because he endeavored to appear and to act unthreatening to white Americans.

The best formulation of Washington's social philosophy remains the Atlanta compromise speech, in which he proclaimed his policy of accommodation to Jim Crow segregation:"In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. "Washington urged blacks to improve themselves by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and curried favor among whites by accepting social segregation and the denial of political rights. In return for these concessions, Washington became a counsel to corporate executives and even presidents of the United States.

Many prominent black intellectuals did not consider Washington to be a true scholar, despite the fact he was intimately involved in educating African Americans. Rev. Alexander Crummell (1819-1898), for one, entirely disagreed with Washington's advocacy of industrial training. Exceptionally well educated for any person of his time, white or black, Crummell spent the years between 1853 and 1872 in Liberia, fighting to "civilize" the indigenous people. Returning to the United States, he devoted the rest of his life to "raising" the African American masses via "civilization and culture."

In his final years, probably in response to Washington's Atlanta compromise speech, Crummell sought to create a vehicle for delivering his own moral message. Thus the American Negro Academy was born in 1897, with the mission of fostering the development of African American intellectual talents, improving the quality of black leadership, and guaranteeing that racist propaganda did not go unchallenged. In Crummell's view, Washington's educational and social philosophy was antithetical to the moral and cultural mission of the academy, but the academy's own policies excluded from membership many African Americans who shared this view—women, for example. As forward-thinking and progressive as the academy may have been, it was still very much a reflection of its time.

A protégé of Alexander Crummell and vice president of the American Negro Academy, W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the Booker T. Washington's most unrelenting critics. In 1903, he published his remarkable book The Souls of Black Folk, directly challenging Washington's political philosophy. In opposition to Washington's doctrine of self-help, Du Bois advanced the notion that a "talented tenth" of well-educated African Americans would save the black masses. The talented tenth, Du Bois reasoned, had the ability to bring civilization and cultural refinement to black Americans.

Although Du Bois's philosophy appealed to intellectuals for obvious reasons, many of them found it difficult to maneuver around Washington's powerful political machine. Du Bois did his best to implement his own plan of action through organizations like the Niagara Movement (1905-1909) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; founded in 1909), both of which he helped establish. But his greatest success as a public intellectual came through his editor-ship of the NAACP magazine, Crisis. From his editorial perch, he routinely advocated positions that he felt African Americans would do well to take. One of his most famous editorials was addressed to black soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War I, where they had made the world "safe for democracy," to the violence of Jim Crow America. Du Bois concluded his editorial with a threat: "We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting."SEE PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENT W. E. B. Du Bois and the "Economics of Emancipation"

THE EDUCATOR AS INTELLECTUAL: ANNA JULIA COOPER

While W. E. B. Du Bois conducted his fights at the national level, Anna Julia Cooper waged her battle for educational improvement at the local level. The only woman who was ever elected to the American Negro Academy or invited to speak at its conferences, Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) was a master educator wholly committed to the profession of teaching. Cooper received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Oberlin College (1884 and 1887), and in 1892 she published a volume of essays, A Voice from the South, which emphasized the importance of educated African American women to the future of black America.

Beginning in 1897, Cooper spent the better part of the next four decades working to improve educational opportunities for blacks in the District of Columbia. To that end, she served from 1901 to 1906 as principal of the M Street High School (the second female to hold the position), almost single-handedly turning it into one of the finest high schools for African Americans in the country. Indeed, M Street, renamed Dunbar High School in 1916, was one of only a handful of black schools whose graduates were not required to take special competency exams for college admission.

Not content with the critically important role she played in the lives of countless District youths, Cooper continued an aggressive public and private push for educational excellence. She pursued further graduate studies of her own at the Guilde Internationale in Paris and at Columbia University, receiving her doctorate from the University of Paris in 1925. She was sixty-seven years old. Five years later, she founded Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C., an evening school for blacks working full-time, which offered college-level courses in law and religion. The classes were held at Cooper's home. She served as the school's president for ten years and its registrar for another ten.

THE BLACK WOMEN'S CLUB MOVEMENT AND THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR COLORED WOMEN

The 1890s also saw the beginning of the Black Women's Club Movement, which took the lead in battles to improve the daily lives of African Americans, especially women and children. In 1893, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924) founded the Women's New Era Club, which set up kindergartens for black children in Boston and elsewhere, as well as establishing ties with similar organizations in other cities. In 1895, under Ruffin's leadership, the National Federation of Afro-American Women held its first meetings in Boston to establish a national organization of women's groups, which would lead, in the following year, to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).

The NACW functioned as the umbrella organization for numerous black women's groups around the country, setting national policies and agendas in a variety of areas, including improvements in living and working conditions, child-care and early education, and training and support for young mothers. The association's first chairwoman was Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), a daughter of newly freed slaves who had risen to civic prominence in Washington, D.C.

Terrell shared with Ruffin, Fannie Barrier Williams of Chicago (1855-1944), and many other women in the club movement a belief in the value of "self-help. "Most had entered the middle class through dint of education and effort, a combination which they encouraged other black women to embrace for themselves and their children. They also encouraged black women who were successful to continue to labor for the progress of others. The founding motto of the National Association of Colored Women,"Lifting as We Climb," captured the double mission of those in the club movement: to maintain and advance the economic interests of African Americans through the elevation of the working and middle classes.

Central to the club movement was a strong belief in women's education and the worth of women's work, as moral and spiritual leaders, as mothers and homemakers, and as domestic and industrial laborers. This belief united those in the club movement with other African American women in the first decades of the twentieth century—the noted educator Mary McLeod Bethune(1875-1955), for example—and also with women like Maria Stewart (1803-1879), Sojourner Truth (1797?-1883), and Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911), who had been active in the antislavery campaign.

ALAIN LOCKE AND THE NEW NEGRO RENAISSANCE

Having discovered that fighting for their country did not gain them full rights at home, African Americans attempted other forms of advancement during the 1920s. The most famous of these attempts was the cultural philosophy promoted by Alain Locke (1885-1954), the first African American Rhodes scholar and a professor of philosophy at Howard University, in his 1925 book The New Negro. With its essays, artwork, poems, and fiction, The New Negro celebrated the artistic and cultural movement spreading through Harlem and other major cities. The philosophy that undergirded this movement, popularly referred to now as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Renaissance, was that African Americans could best demonstrate their contribution to the United States via their cultural production.

While many scholars point to Locke's book as the dawning of the New Negro Renaissance, the debate continues as to when that era ended. Because the movement had no specific political agenda, there is also debate about whether and in what way it was successful. Whatever the case, it is clear that the New Negro Renaissance launched the careers of several important African American artists whose work continues to influence American thought and expression: Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Claude McKay (1890-1948), Nella Larsen (1893-1964), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), and Countee Cullen (1903-1946), to name a few.

Locke also promoted the rise of a new generation of African American scholars. At Howard University, then the nation's most prestigious black college, Locke urged the recruitment of and then mentored a small flock of African American intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, people like the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) and the political scientist—and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient—Ralph Bunche (1904-1971). While a small handful of black Americans had earned Ph.D.s before the mid-1920s, these scholars were part of the first generation of African Americans to receive doctorates in any great numbers. In this respect, they differed from those who preceded them at historically black colleges and universities, to which social custom continued to confine African Americans scholars and teachers.

A WIDENING TRADITION OF INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP

The young scholars of this generation were the first modern African American intellectuals, not limited to or defined by theological training like many nineteenth-century African American intellectuals. Furthermore, they were the first African Americans to be recruited to work in administrative positions within the federal government. Starting in the early 1930s, several highly trained African Americans began to take positions as "race advisers" in Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1882-1945) New Deal administration, and many spent much of their working lives in government service. The economist Robert C. Weaver (1907-1997), for example, Roosevelt's first race adviser, eventually became the first black to hold a cabinet position as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973). While we may never know exactly how much influence these race advisers had, we cannot ignore the fact that, from the 1930s on, African American intellectuals were operating from within the political establishment.

Despite their new access to political power, many African American intellectuals preferred to practice their craft within the cloistered walls of the university, and after World War II, teaching opportunities at historically white universities began to be available to black scholars. Most remained at black institutions, but the door had been thrown open to future generations of academics. Interestingly, just as African Americans began to enjoy professional access to major research universities, black ministers became a resurgent force on the national scene. As the fight against slavery had done a century before, the Civil Rights movement now called forth the preacher-activist.

In the 1960s, a new class of intellectuals emerged. Completely secular and rarely holding advanced degrees, these "organic intellectuals" used their cerebral talents to forge new artistic, political, and protest movements. Perhaps the best exemplar of this new tradition is Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935), Black Panther philosopher, petty criminal, and admitted rapist. Cleaver's brilliant and yet often disturbing masterwork, Soul on Ice, much of which was written while he was in prison, reminds us that we cannot accept too limiting a view of who can or cannot be an intellectual.

Much has changed since Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker astonished the public with their abilities. While we may still be impressed by the intellectual capabilities of some black scholars, we can no longer be surprised, for the African American intellectual tradition now spans nearly three centuries. In the early 2000s, the proliferation of black scholars pushing the envelope of intellectual inquiry, regardless of the form that envelope takes, guarantees that this tradition will continue unabated.

Indeed, some observers believe that we are in the middle of a golden age for African American intellectuals. President Bill Clinton (b. 1946) commissioned Maya Angelou (b. 1928) to write a poem for his inauguration ("On the Pulse of Morning"); the novelist Toni Morrison (b. 1929) has won a Nobel Prize for literature; Rita Dove (b. 1952) has been named the nation's poet laureate; the cultural critic Cornel West (b. 1953) has become an almost permanent fixture on the international lecture circuit; and, in the light of the ascendancy of the Republican Party, neoconservative academics like Thomas Sowell (b. 1930) are in a unique position to affect national policy from inside and outside the government.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackett, R. J. M. Beating against the Barriers: The Lives of Six Nineteenth-Century Afro-Americans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Brotz, Howard. African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1992.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. 1967. Reprint. New York: Quill, 1984.

Franklin, John Hope, and August Meier, eds. Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Litwack, Leon, and August Meier, eds. Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Logan, Rayford, and Michael Winston, eds. Dictionary of American Negro Biography. New York: Norton, 1982.

Magill, Frank, ed. Masterpieces of African-American Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.

Meier, August, et al., eds. Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENT

"The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race," by Henry Highland Garnet

INTRODUCTION

On February 14, 1848, on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, New York, Henry Highland Garnet delivered a speech offering his view of the destiny of black Americans. "The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race" reveals Garnet's thoughts during the years of his greatest fame, in the two decades preceding the Civil War. Reprinted in pamphlet form, it was widely read and discussed during his lifetime.

Though Garnet did not share the anticolonization passion of James Forten or his own contemporary, Frederick Douglass, he does echo their view that African Americans are an inseparable part of the nation: "We are now colonized. We are planted here. "And then, in a striking phrase, he adds,"It is too late to make a successful attempt to separate the black and white people in the New World. They love one another too much to endure a separation."

This is a hopeful, even stirring speech, in which Garnet looks back to earlier, and what he sees as outmoded, theories of black inferiority, and forward, past the present enslaved condition of millions of African Americans, to a future of "blessings.""The star of our hope is slowly and steadily rising above the horizon," Garnet asserts. To hasten its ascent, he urges upon his fellow African Americans a Christian program of "peace and temperance, industry and frugality, and love to God, and to all men."

Who is there, after looking at these facts, will question the probability of the assumption, that this republic, and this continent, are to be the theatre in which the grand drama of our triumphant Destiny is to be enacted.

The Red men of North America are retreating from the approach of the white man. They have fallen like trees on the ground in which they first took root, and on the soil which their foliage once shaded. But the Colored race, although they have been transplanted in a foreign land, have clung to and grown with their oppressors, as the wild dry entwines around the trees of the forest, nor can they be torn thence. At this moment when so much feigned hatred is manifested toward us, our blood is mixed with every tribe from Cape Horn to the Frozen Ocean. Skillful men have are themselves to work at analyzation, and yet in many cases they are perplexed in deciding where to draw the line between the Negro and the Anglo Saxon. Whenever our colorless brethren say of themselves, on far do they proclaim our future position. Do they say in proud exultation.

No pent up Utica contracts our powers, The whole boundless continent is ours, in this they bespeak our destiny.

There are those who, either from good or evil motives, plead for the utopian plan of the Colonization of a whole race to the shores of Africa. We are now colonized. We are planted here, and we cannot as a whole people, be re-colonized back to our fatherland. It is no late to make a successful attempt to separate the black and white people in the New World. They love one another too much to endure a separation. Where one is, there will the other be also. Ruth, of the old Testament, puts the resolve of our destiny in our mouths, which we will repeat to those who would expatriate us: "Entreat me nor to leave thee nor return from following after thee, for whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God. Where thou diest there will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more; if aught but death part thee and me."

This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race. Statesmen, distinguished for their forecast, have gravely said that the blacks must either be removed, or such as I have seated will be the result. It is a stubborn fact that it is impossible to separate the pale man and the man of color, and therefore the result which to them is so fearful, is inevitable. All this the wiser portion of the Colonizationists see, and they labor no hinder it. It matters not whether we abhor or desire such a consummation, it is now too late to change the decree of nature and circumstances. As well might we attempt to shake the Alleghanies with our hands, or to burst the rock of Gibralter with our fists. If the colored people should all consent to leave this country, on the day of their departure there would be sore lamentations, the like of which the world has not heard since Rachel wept for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not. We would insist upon taking all who have our generous and prolific blood in their veins. In such an event, the American church and state would be bereaved. The Reverend Francis L. Hawks, D.D., of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a man who is receiving the largest salary of any divine in the country, would be called upon to make the sacrifice of leaving a good living, and to share the fate of his brethren according to the flesh. The Reverend Dr. Murphy, of Herkimer, New York, a Presbyterian, would be compelled to leave his beloved flock; and how could they endure the loss of a shepherd so eloquent, so faithful and so kind. We should be burdened with that renegade Negro of the United States Senate, Mr. Yulee, of Florida. We should take one of the wives of Senator Samuel Houston. The consort,—the beautiful Cleopatra of his Excellency, R. M. Johnson, late Democratic Vice President of this great nation,—would be the foremost in the vast company of exiles. After we all should return to tread the golden sands of Africa, whether we would add to the morality of our kindred across the deep waters future generations would decide. One thing, I am certain of, and that is, many of the slave-holders and lynchers of the South are nor very moral now. Our cousins of the tribe of Shem are welcome to our deserters. If they are enriched by them they may be assured that we are not impoverished.

On the other continent, the destiny of the colored people will be similar to that of the people among whom they are scattered. Colorphobia is confined almost entirely to the United States and the Canadas. We speak of prejudice against color, but in fact, nothing of the kind exists. The prejudice is against the condition alone. Were not this the case the American feeling would pervade the whole earth.

Many things that there intended for evil to us, will result, I trust, in good. The tyrants have debarred us from the wealth accruing from trade and commerce. This is an evil. But may it not be hoped that we are their juniors in the art of cheating? We have among us some arrant cheats, but it is presumed that but a few will doubt that our white brothers bear off the palm in this department of human depravity. The besetting sins of the Anglo-Saxon race are, the love of gain and the love of power. In many instances, while our services could be dispensed with, we have not been permitted to join the army, and of course have not been killed in the wars. We have been driven from the sanctuaries where our oppressors worship, and it may be that we are not quite as hypocritical as their practices have made them. When the great national account shall be rendered before the tribunal of Justice, the guilt of course must be borne by those who might have had, or who have used the power of the government. There may, therefore, is some good that may come our of this evil. But no thanks to the evil doers. Their works are evil still, the good comes in spite of them.

The old doctrine of the natural inferiority of the colored race, propagated in America by Mr. Thomas Jefferson, has long since been refused by Dr. John Mason Goode, and numerous respectable witnesses from among the slandered, both living and dead: Pushkin in Russia, Dumas in France, Toussaint in Hayti, Banaker, Theodore Sedgwick Wright, and a host in America, and a brilliant galaxy in Ancient History.

There are blessings in store for our patient, suffering race,—there is light and glory. The star of our hope is slowly and steadily rising above the horizon. As a land that has long been covered by storms and clouds, and shaken by thunder, when the storms and clouds had passed away, and the thunder was succeeded by a clam, like that which cheered the first glad morning, and flower and shrub smiled as they looked up to God, and the mountains, plains and valleys rung with joy,—so shall this race come forth and re-occupy their station of renown.

But how shall we hasten on that period? How shall we acquit ourselves on the field where the great battle is to be fought? By following after peace and temperance, industry and frugality, and love to God, and to all men, and by resisting tyranny in the name of Eternal Justice. We must also become acquainted with the arts and sciences, and agricultural pursuits. These will elevate any people and sever any chain.

We must also cherish and maintain national and patriotic sentiment and attachment. Some people of color say that they have no home, no country. I am not among that number. It is empty declamation. It is unwise. It is not logical—it is false.

Of all the people in this wide earth, among the countless hordes of misery, there is not one so poor as to be without a home and a country. America is my home, my country, and I have no other. I love whatever good there may be in her institutions. I hate her sins. I loathe her slavery, and I pray Heaven that ere long she may wash away her guilt in tears of repentance. I love the green-hills which my eyes first beheld in my infancy. I love every inch of soil which my feet pressed in my youth, and I mourn because the accursed shade of slavery rests upon it, I love my country's flag, and I hope that soon it will be cleansed of its stains, and be hailed by all nations as the emblem of freedom and independence.

PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENT

W. E. B. Du Bois and the "Economics of Emancipation"

INTRODUCTION

The Seventh Annual Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, which was held at Atlanta University in May 1902, focused on the fate of the black artisan after emancipation. Much of the conference report was written by W. E. B. Du Bois, in his role as both historian and sociologist.

The following sections of the report, entitled "The Ante-Bellum Artisan" and "The Economics of Emancipation," offer a brief but first-rate history of skilled African American workers during slavery and of the obstacles such workers encountered in their search for employment following emancipation.

2. The Ante-bellum Artisan. Before the civil war both slaves and free Negroes were artisans to some extent. It is difficult to-day, however, to determine just what proportion could do skilled work and how their work would compare with that of artisans of to-day. We are told that in Virginia:

The county records of the seventeenth century reveal the presence of many Negro mechanics in the colony during that period, this being especially the case with carpenters and coopers. This was what might be expected. The slave was inferior in skill, but the ordinary mechanical needs of the plantation did not demand the highest aptitude. The fact that the African was a servant for life was an advantage covering many deficiencies; nevertheless, it is significant that large slaveholders like Colonel Byrd and Colonel Fitzhugh should have gone to the inconvenience and expense of importing English handicraftsmen who were skilled in the very trades in which it is certain that several of the Negroes belonging to these planters had been specially trained. It shows the low estimate in which the planters held the knowledge of their slaves regarding the higher branches of mechanical work.

As examples of slave mechanics it is stated that among the slaves of the first Robert Beverly was a carpenter valued at (L)30, and that Ralph Wormeley, of Middlesex country, owned a cooper and a carpenter each valued at (L)35. Colonel William Byrd mentions the use of Negroes in iron mining in 1732. In New Jersey slaves were employed as miners, iron-workers, saw-mill hands, house and ship-carpenters, wheelwrights, coopers tanners, shoemakers, millers and bakers, among other employments, before the Revolutionary war. As early as 1708 there were enough slave mechanics in Pennsylvania to make the freemen feel their competition severely. In Massachusetts and other states we hear of an occasional artisan.

During the early part of the 19th century the Negro artisans increased. In the District of Columbia many "were superior mechanics .… Benjamin Banneker, the Negro Astronomer, assisting in surveying the District in 1791" Olmsted, in his journeys through the slave states, just before the civil war, found slave artisans in all the states: In Virginia they worked in tobacco factories, ran steamboats, made barrels, etc. On a South Carolina plantation he was told by the master that the Negro mechanics "exercised as much skill and ingenuity as the ordinary mechanics that he was used to employ in New England. "In Charleston and some other places they were employed in cotton factories. In Alabama he saw a black carpenter—a careful and accurate calculator and excellent workman; he was bought for $2,000. In Louisiana he was told that master mechanics often brought up slave mechanics and acted as contractors. In Kentucky the slaves worked in factories for hemp-bagging, and in iron works on the Cumberland river, and also in tobacco factories. In the newspapers advertisements for runaway mechanics were often seen, as, for instance a blacksmith in Texas,"very smart," a mason in Virginia, etc. In Mobile an advertisement read "good blacksmiths and horseshoers for sale on reasonable terms."

An ex-governor of Mississippi says:

Prior to the war there were a large number of Negro mechanics in the Southern States; many of them were expert blacksmiths, wheelwrights, wagon-makers, brick-masons, carpenters, plasterers, painters and shoemakers. They became masters of their respective trades by reason of sufficiently long service under the control and direction of expert white mechanics. During the existence of slavery the contract for qualifying the Negro as a mechanic was made between his owner and the master workman.

Such slaves were especially valuable and formed usually a privileged class, with a large degree of freedom. They were very often hired out by their masters and sometimes hired their own time although this latter practice was frowned upon as giving slaves too much freedom and nearly all states forbade it by law; although some, like Georgia, permitted the custom in certain cities. In all cases the slave mechanic was encouraged to do good work by extra wages which went into his own pocket. For instance, in the semi-skilled work of the Tobacco-factories, the Virginia master received from $150-$200 annually for his slave and the employer fed him; but the slave, by extra work, could earn for himself $5 or more a month. So carpenters sometimes received as much as $2 a day for their masters, and then were given the chance to earn more for themselves. In Texas nine slaves, some of them carpenters, were leased at an average of $280.22 a year and probably earned something over this. If the mechanic was a good workman and honest the master was tempted to allow him to do as he pleased so long as he paid the master a certain yearly income. In this way there arose in nearly all Southern cities a class of Negro clients free in everything but name; they owned property, reared families and often lived in comfort. In earlier times such mechanics often bought themselves and families and became free, but as the laws began to bear hard on free Negroes they preferred to remain under the patronage and nominal ownership of their white masters. In other cases they migrated North and there worked out their freedom, sending back stipulated sums. Many if not most of the noted leaders of the Negro in earlier times belonged to this slave mechanic class, such as Vesey, Nat Turner, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. They were exposed neither to the corrupting privileges of the house servants nor to the blighting tyranny of field work and had large opportunity for self development.

Usually the laws did not hinder the slaves from learning trades. On the other hand the laws against teaching slaves really hindered the mechanics from attaining very great efficiency save in rare cases—they must work by rule of thumb usually. North Carolina allowed slaves to learn mathematical calculations, but not reading and writing; Georgia in 1833 decreed that no one should permit a Negro "to transact business for him in writing. "Gradually such laws became more severe: Mississippi in 1830 debarred slaves from printing offices and Georgia in 1845 declared that slaves and free Negroes could not take contracts for building and repairing houses, as mechanics or masons. Restrictions, however, were not always enforced, especially in the building trades, and the slave mechanic flourished.

One obstacle he did encounter however from first to last and that was the opposition of white mechanics. In 1708 the white mechanics of Pennsylvania protested against the hiring out of Negro mechanics and were successful in gettiug acts passed to restrict the further importation of slaves but they were disallowed in England. In 1722 they protested again and the Legislative

Assembly declared that the hiring of black mechanics was "dangerous and injurious to the republic and not to be sanctioned. "Especially in border states was opposition fierce. In Maryland the legislature was urged in 1837 to forbid free Negroes entirely from being artisans; in 1840 a bill was reported to keep Negro labor out of tobacco ware-houses; in 1844 petitions came to the legislature urging the prohibition of free black carpenters and taxing free black mechanics; and finally in 1860 white mechanics urged a law barring free blacks "from pursuing any mechanical branch of trade. "Mississippi mechanics told Olmsted that they resented the competition of slaves and that one refused the free services of three Negroes for six years as apprentices to his trade. In Wilmington, N. C., 1857, a number of persons destroyed the frame work of a new building erected by Negro carpenters and threatened to destroy all edifices erected by Negro carpenters or mechanics. A public meeting was called to denounce the act and offer a reward. The deed was charged upon an organized association of 150 white workingmen. There were similar disturbances in Virginia, and in South Carolina white mechanics about this time were severely condemned by the newspapers as "enemies to our peculiar institutions and formidable barriers to the success of our own native mechanics."

In Ohio about 1820 to 1830 and thereafter, the white Mechanics' Societies combined against Negroes. One master mechanic, President of the Mechanical Association of Cincinnati, was publicly tried by the Society for assisting a young Negro to learn a train. Such was the feeling that no colored boy could find entrance as apprentice, and few workmen were allowed to pursue their calling. One Negro cabinet-maker purchased his freedom in Kentucky and came to Cincinnati; for a long time he could get no work; one Englishman employed him but the white workmen struck. The black man was compelled to become a laborer until by saving he could take small contracts and hire black mechanics to help him. In Philadelphia the series of fearful riots against Negroes was due in large part to the jealousy of white working men, and in Washington, D. C., New York and other cities, riots and disorder on the part of white mechanics, aimed against Negroes, occurred several times.

There were, no doubt, many very efficient slave mechanics. One who learned his trade from a slave writes us an interesting and enthusiastic account of the work of these men:

During the days of slavery the Negro mechanic was a man of importance. He was a most valuable slave to his master. He would always sell for from two to three times as much in the market as the unskilled slaveman. When a fine Negro mechanic was to be sold at public auction, or private sake, the wealthy slave owners would vie with each other for the prize and run the bidding often up into high figures.

The slave owners early saw the aptitude of the Negro to learn handicraft, and fully appreciating what vast importance and value this would be to them (the masters) selected their brightest young slavemen and had them taught in the different kinds of trades. Hence on every large plantation you could find the Negro carpenter, blacksmith, brick and stone mason. These trades comprehended and included much more in their scope in those days than they do now. Carpentry was in its glory then. What is done now by varied and complicated machinery was wrought then by hand. The invention of the planing machine is an event within the knowledge of many persons living to-day. Most of our "wood working" machinery has come into use long since the days of slavery. The same work done now with the machine, was done then by hand. The carpenter's chest of tools in slavery times was a very elaborate and expensive outfit. His "kit" not only included all the tools that the average carpenter carries now, but also the tools for performing all the work done by the various kinds of "wood-working" machines. There is little opportunity for the carpenter of to-day to acquire, or display, genius and skill in his trade as could the artisan of old.

One only needs to go down South and examine hundreds of old Southern mansions, and splendid old church edifices, still intact, to be convinced of the fact of the cleverness of the Negro artisan, who constructed ninetenths of them, and many of them still provoke the admiration of all who see them, and are not to be despised by the men of our day.

There are few, if any, of the carpenters of to-day who, if they had the hand tools, could get out the "stuff" and make one of those old style massive panel doors,—who could work out by hand the mouldings, the stiles, the mullions, etc., and build one of those windows, which are to be found to-day in many of the churches and public buildings of the South; all of which testify to the cleverness of the Negro's skill as artisan in the broadest sense of the term.For the carpenter in those days was also the "cabinet marker," the wood turner, coffin maker, generally the pattern maker, and the maker of most things made of wood. The Negro blacksmith held almost absolute sway in his line, which included the many branches of forgery, and other trades which are now classified under different heads from that of the regular blacksmith. The blacksmith in the days of slavery was expected to make any and everything wrought of iron. He was to all intents and purposes the "machine blacksmith," "horseshoer," "carriage and wagon ironer and trimmer," "gunsmith," "wheelwright"; and often whittled out and ironed the hames, the plowstocks, and the "single trees" for the farmers, and did a hundred other things too numerous to mention. They were experts at tempering edge tools, by what is generally known as the water process. But many of them had secret processes of their own for tempering tools which they guarded with zealous care.

It was the good fortune of your humble servant to have served his time as an apprentice in a general blacksmithing shop, or shop of all work, presided over by an ex-slave genius known throughout the state as a "master mechanic. "In slavery times this man hired his own time—paying his master a certain stipulated amount of money each year, and all he made over and above that amount was his own.

The Negro machinists were also becoming numerous before the downfall of slavery. The slave owners were generally the owners of all the factories, machine shops, flour-mills, saw-mills, gin houses and threshing machines. They owned all the railroads and the shops connected with them. In all of these the white laborer and mechanic had been supplanted almost entirely by the slave mechanics at the time of the breaking out of the civil war. Many of the railroads in the South had their entire train crews, except the conductors, made up of the slaves—including engineers and firemen. The "Georgia Central" had inaugrated just such a movement, and had many Negro engineers on its locomotives and Negro machinists in its shops. So it will be seen at once that the liberation of the slaves was also the salvation of the poor white man of the South. It saved him from being completely ousted, as a laborer and a mechanic, by the masters, to make place for the slaves whom they were having trained for those positions. Yet, strange as it may seem to us now, the great mass of poor white men in the South who were directly and indirectly affected by the slave mechanic—being literally forced out of the business, took up arms and fought against the abolition of slavery!

While the poor whites and the masters were fighting, these same black men were at home working to support those fighting for their slavery. The Negro mechanic could be found, during the conflict, in the machine shops, building engines and railroad cars; in the gun factories making arms of all kinds for the soldiers; in the various shops building wagons, and making harness, bridles and saddles, for the armies of the South. Negro engineers handled the throttle in many cases to haul the soldiers to the front, whose success, in the struggle going on, meant continued slavery to themselves and their people. All of the flour mills, and most of every other kind of mill, of the South, was largely in charge of black men.

Much has been said of the new Negro for the new century, but with all his training he will have to take a long stride in mechanical skill before he reaches the point of practical efficiency where the old Negro of the old century left off. It was the good fortune of the writer once to fall into the hands of an uncle who was master of what would now be half a dozen distinct trades. He was generally known as a mill-wright, or mill builder. A mill-wright now, is only a man who merely sets up the machinery, and his work is now confined mostly to the hanging of shafting, pulleys and belting. In the days of slavery the mill-wright had to know how to construct everything about the mill, from foundation to roofs. This uncle could take his men with their "cross cut saws" and "broad axes" and go into the forests, hew the timbers with which to build the dams across the rivers and streams of water, to erect the "mill house" frames, get out all the necessary timber and lumber at the saw mill. Then he would, without a sign of a drawing on paper, lay out and cut every piece, every mortise and tenon, every brace and rafter with their proper angles, &c., with perfect precision before they put the whole together. I have seen my uncle go into the forest, fell a great tree, hew out of it an immense stick or shaft from four feet to five feet in diameter, and from twenty to thirty feet long, having as many as sixteen to twenty faces on its surface, or as they termed it, "sixteen" and "twenty square. "He would then take it to the mill seat and mortise it, make the arms, and all the intricate parts for a great "overshot" water wheel to drive the huge mill machinery. This is a feat most difficult even for modern mechanics who have a thorough knowledge of mathematics and the laws of mechanics.

It is difficult for us to understand how those men with little or no knowledge of mathematics, or mechanical rules, could take a crude stick of timber, shape it, and then go to work and cut out a huge screw and the "Tap blocks" for those old style cotton presses.

To the above testimony we may append reports from various localities. From Alabama we have a report from an artisan at Tuskegee who was 14 or 15 years old at the breaking out of the civil war. The Principal of the Academic Department writes: "He is one of the most remarkable men you ever saw. He is a fine tinner, shoemaker and harness maker, and until the school grew so large held all these trades under his instruction. He is an all-round tinker and can do anything from the repairing of a watch to the mending of an umbrella. "This man names 25 Negro carpenters, 11 blacksmiths, 3 painters, 2 wheelwrights, 3 tinsmiths, 2 tanners, 5 masons, and 14 shoemakers in Tuskegee and the surrounding districts before the war. "Tuskegee was a small place" he writes "and you will wonder why such a number of mechanics were there. The answer is this: there were a large number of wealthy white people who lived in the county, owning large numbers of slaves, and there was thus a lot of work all through the country districts; so they were sent out to do the work. "Of them in general he says: "The mechanics as a rule lived more comfortably than any other class of the Negroes. A number of them hired their time and made money; they wore good clothes and ate better food than the other classes of colored people. In other words they stood higher in the estimation of the white people than any of the others. A very small number of them were allowed to live by themselves in out of the way houses. All the master wanted of them was to stay on his place and pay over their wages promptly. As a rule a white man contracted for the jobs and overlooked the work. These white men often did not know anything about the trade but had Negro foremen under them who really carried on the work. "From Georgia there are two reports:."Before the civil war all of the artisans in this section of the state were colored men. Their masters compelled some of their slaves to learn these trades so that they could do the necessary work around the plantations. "In Marshalville, on the other hand,"There were only two Negro artisans here before the war. "From West Virginia comes a report: there were "but two skilled laborers" previous to the war in Bluefield. In Chester, South Carolina,"Before the war there were practically no Negro artisans."Charleston reports:"We have no accurate data to work on, except experiences of ex-slaves, who seem to agree that though the anti-bellum artisan was very proficient, yet he could not be compared in point of intelligent service with the artisan of to-day. "From Greenville we learn: "The Negro since the war has entered trades more largely and in more varied lines. He is now in trades not open to him before freedom. "In Mississippi one town reports that "Before the war Negroes were not artisans from choice, but many large planters would train some of their slaves in carpentry or blacksmithing for plantation use. Then the Negro did not have to ask, Does this trade pay? Now he does. "Another locality says: "Before the war the principal trades were carpentry and blacksmithing and were done by training slaves. "In Louisiana "Before and since the war Negroes have built some of the best structures" in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Olmsted noted many Negro mechanics here. In Texas there were "few if any" Negro mechanics in Georgetown before the war, while in Dallas they did "most of the skilled labor. "In Arkansas artisans were few. In Tennessee there were relatively more artisans before the war than now in Nashville, fewer in Murfreesboro and McMinnville and about the same number in Maryville. In the District of Columbia there were many Negro artisans in ante-bellum times, as shown by the directories.

It is not altogether clear from such incomplete reports as to just what the status or efficiency of the ante-bellum artisan was. It is clear that there were some very efficient workmen and a large number who knew something of the various trades. Still, we must remember that it would be easy to exaggerate the ability and importance of the mass of these workmen.

"The South was lacking in manufactures, and used little machinery. Its demand for skilled labor was not large, but what demand existed was supplied mainly by Negroes. Negro carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, painters, harnessmakers, tanners, millers, weavers, barrelmakers, basketmakers, shoemakers, chairmakers, coachmen, spinners, seamstresses, housekeepers, gardeners, cooks, laundresses, embroiderers, maids of all work, were found in every community, and frequently on a single plantation. Skilled labor was more profitable than unskilled, and therefore every slave was made as skillful as possible under a slave system."

Here we have, perhaps, the best key to the situation in the South before the war; there was little demand for skilled labor in the rather rude economy of the average slave plantation and the Negro did the most of this. The slave artisan, however, was rather a jack-of-all-trades than a mechanic in the modern sense of the term—he could build a barn, make a barrel, mend an umbrella or shoe a horse. Exceptional slaves did the work exceptionally well, but the average workman was poor, careless and ill-trained, and could not have earned living wages under modern competitive conditions. While then it is perfectly true to say that the slave was the artisan of the South before the war it is probably also true that the average of workmanship was low and suited only to rough plantation life. This does not, of course, gainsay for a moment the fact that on some of the better plantations and in cities like Richmond, Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans, there were really first-class Negro workmen who did good work.

3. Economics of Emancipation. Slaves and the lowest freemen were the ordinary artisans of Greece and Rome, save only as the great artists now and then descended from above as sculptors and architects. In mediaeval times mechanics were largely bondsmen and serfs and were purchased and imported just as black carpenters formed a part of the expenses of a Texas emigrant in 1850. While exceptional mechanics in the middle ages acquired a degree of practical freedom just as the Negro mechanics of the South did, yet they were in earlier times serfs. Gradually in free communities there arose a class of free mechanics, but in the rural districts and in the households of the lords they still, for many generations, remained serfs. The rise and development of cities gave the freed artisan his chance; there, by defensive and offensive organization, he became the leading factor in the economic and political development of the new city-states. His development was rapid, and about the 14th century a distinction between laborers and masters arose which has gradually grown and changed into our modern problem of labor and capital.

A very interesting comparison between this development and the situation of the Southern freedmen might be drawn at some length. Even before the war a movement of slaves to the cities took place: first of house-servants with the masters' families and then of slave artisans: if the slave was a good artisan he was worth more hired out in the city than on the country plantation. Moreover, the Negro greatly preferred to be in town—he had more liberty, more associates, and more excitement. Probably in time there would have been evolved in the South a class of city serf-artisans and servants considerably removed from the mass of field-hands. It is significant that the Georgia law prohibiting slaves from hiring their time specifically excepted certain of the larger towns.

After emancipation came suddenly, in the midst of war and social upheaval, the first real economic question was the self-protection of freed working men. There were three chief classes of them: the agricultural laborers chiefly in the country districts, the house-servants in town and country and the artisans who were rapidly migrating to town. The Freedman's Bureau undertook the temporary guardianship of the first class, the second class easily passed from half-free service to half-servile freedom. The third class, the artisans, however, met peculiar conditions. They had always been used to working under the guardianship of a master and even though that guardianship in some cases was but nominal yet it was of the greatest value for protection. This soon became clear as the Negro freed artisan set up business for himself: if there was a creditor to be sued he could no longer bring suit in the name of an influential white master; if there was a contract to be had, there was no responsible white patron to answer for the good performance of the work. Nevertheless, these differences were not strongly felt at first—the friendly patronage of the former master was often voluntarily given the freedman and for some years following the war the Negro mechanic still held undisputed sway. Three occurrences, however, soon disturbed the situation:

(a). The competition of white mechanics.

(b). The efforts of the Negro for self-protection.

(c). The new industrial development of the South.

These changes were spread over a series of years and are not yet complete, but they are the real explanation of certain facts which have hitherto been explained in false and inadequate ways. It has, for instance, been said repeatedly that the Negro mechanic carelessly threw away his monopoly of the Southern labor market and allowed the white mechanic to supplant him. This is only partially true. To be sure, the ex-slave was not alert, quick and ready to meet competition. His business hitherto had been to do work but not to get work, save in exceptional cases. The whole slave system of labor saved him from certain sorts of competition, and when he was suddenly called to face the competition of white mechanics he was at a loss. His especial weakness was the lack of a hiring contractor. His master or a white contractor had usually taken jobs and hired him. The white contractor still hired him but there was no one now to see that the contractor gave him fair wages. Indeed, as the white mechanics pressed forward the only refuge of the Negro mechanic was lower wages. There were a few Negro contractors here and there but they again could only hope to maintain themselves by markedly underbidding all competitors and attaining a certain standing in the community.

What the Negro mechanic needed then was social protection—the protection of law and order, perfectly fair judicial processes and that personal power which is in the hands of all modern laboring classes in civilized lands, viz., the right of suffrage. It has often been said that the freedman throwing away his industrial opportunities after the war gave his energies to politics and succeeded in alienating his friends and exasperating his enemies, and proving his inability to rule. It is doubtless true that the freedman laid too much stress on the efficacy of political power in making a straight road to real freedom. And undoubtedly, too, a bad class of politicians, white and black, took advantage of this and made the reconstruction Negro voter a hissing in the ears of the South. Notwithstanding this the Negro was fundamentally right. If the whole class of mechanics here, as in the Middle Age, had been without the suffrage and half-free, the Negro would have had an equal chance with the white mechanic, and could have afforded to wait. But he saw himself coming more and more into competition with men who had the right to vote, the prestige of race and blood, the advantage of intimate relations with those acquainted with the market and the demand. The Negro saw clearly that his industrial rise depended, to an important degree, upon his political power and he therefore sought that power. In this seeking he failed primarily because of his own poor training, the uncompromising enmity and apprehensions of his white neighbors and the selfishness and half-hearted measures of his emancipators. The result was that the black artisan entered the race heavily handicapped—the member of a proscribed class, with restricted rights and privileges, without political and social power. The result was of course that he was enabled to maintain himself only by accepting low wages and keeping at all hazards the good-will of the community.

Even here however he could not wholly succeed. The industrial conditions in the country were rapidly changing. Slowly but surely the new industrial South began to arise and with it came new demands on the mechanic. Now the Negro mechanic could not in the very nature of the case meet these demands; he knew how to do a few things by rule of thumb—he could build one of the rambling old-fashioned southern mansions, he could build a slave shanty; he could construct a rough sugar hogshead and resole a shoe; in exceptional cases he could do even careful and ingenious work in certain lines; but as a rule he knew little of the niceties of modern carpentry or iron-working, he knew practically nothing of mills and machinery, very little about railroads—in fact he was especially ignorant in those very lines of mechanical and industrial development in which the South has taken the longest strides in the last thirty-years. And if he was ignorant, who was to teach him? Certainly not his white fellow workmen, for they were his bitterest opponents because of strong race-prejudice and because of the fact that the Negro works for low wages. Apprenticeship to the older Negro mechanics was but partially successful for they could not teach what they had never learned. In fact it was only through the lever of low wages that the Nergo secured any share in the new industries. By that means he was enabled to replace white laborers in many branches, but he thereby increased the enmity of trades-unions and labor-leaders. Such in brief was the complicated effort of emancipation on the Negro artisan and one could not well imagine a situation more difficult to remedy.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Born in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in 1868 and educated at Fisk and Harvard Universities and the University of Berlin, W. E. B. Du Bois became one of the greatest American intellectuals of the twentieth century. A prolific writer, he also was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and for many years the editor of its chief magazine, Crisis. Du Bois also helped organize the first PanAfrican Conference in 1919, and late in his life emigrated to Ghana, where he became a citizen.

As a young man, Du Bois vigorously opposed Booker T. Washington's championing of economic progress at the expense of civil rights and higher education. In particular, he deplored Washington's emphasis on vocational training as the sole educational model for black Americans. He argued instead for a "talented tenth" of African Americans, trained to the highest standards, who would be in the vanguard of racial leadership and progress.

In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois included "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," his most extended critique of Washington's "programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights."

Black Intellectuals: Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and the Atlanta Compromise

Booker T. Washington was famous for having been born to slavery and worked to build himself up, "a self-made man. "He was perhaps equally famous for his "accomodationist" stance regarding blacks and the ills of slavery, admonishing those who were angry at the institution itself and former slave owners. In 1895, Booker T. Washington was invited to address the Atlanta International Cotton Exposition. Although Washington had traveled widely and was well known as a speaker and the founder of Tuskegee Institute, this event, which has come to be known as the "Atlanta compromise," brought him into national prominence.

Washington urged his listeners, black and white, to "cast down your buckets where you are. "For black southerners, this meant staying put and trying to achieve economic progress in traditional fields of work, such as agriculture, mechanics, and domestic service. For white southerners, it meant using black labor rather than turning to "those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits," the immigrants who were flooding into the nation.

Washington reminded his white listeners several times of all they shared, historically and economically, with their black neighbors. But he bowed to segregationist fears when he claimed that "in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. "Moreover, he seemed to dismiss the struggle for civil rights, especially voting rights, as "artificial forcing."

Although Washington's speech was hailed by whites in both the North and South, it was condemned by many other black leaders as affirming Jim Crow segregation and encouraging violence. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote,"Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. "Du Bois's fears were borne out the next year, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case ofPlessy v. Ferguson , ushering in sixty years of legal discrimination.