Divided We Fall

It’s a shame Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois are so frequently pitted against each other when contemporary critics discuss their careers. Sure, their ideas for African American integration differed on some key points, but by and large, their goals were the same, and we should not feel compelled to pick a side. Too often, we do feel that inclination, to the extent that Washington’s name is well-known outside of scholarly circles while Du Bois’s work is rarely discussed outside of academics—rarely in comparison to Washington’s work, at least. It seems as if the fact that it was Washington’s approach and not Du Bois’s that achieved African American integration—some would argue that the job still isn’t done, over a century later—invalidates or devalues Du Bois’s ideas. Sure, Washington’s approach turned out to be the more practical and achievable one, but does that necessarily mean it was better? Most realistic and “best” aren’t always the same. Perhaps Du Bois’s ideas are “better” conceptually (acknowledging the subjectivity of this point,) but they were simply “ahead of his time,” to borrow an oft-abused idiom.

Interestingly, to me at least, I actually think Booker T. Washington himself would agree that Du Bois’s ideas were “better,” that they held more merit. He was, though, perhaps a bit more of a realist, and he proposed methods that he believed to be achievable rather than argue for the ideal. It’s hard to condemn him for not sticking to his true beliefs, if that is the case, when we have the luxury of present-day context to guide us. Knowing that African American integration is in some ways still not fully complete over a century later—only the truly naïve believe racism to be dead—it’s fair to wonder how much longer African Americans may have had to wait to get even this far if they didn’t make concessions to allow the transition to occur gradually.

Pitting the two activists against each other, forcing us to pick a side, fails to recognize this fact about the nature of their arguments: both were right. Washington simply had the privilege of living during the appropriate time period to convey his message. W.E.B. Du Bois could accomplish so much more today than he could in the early 1900s. African Americans have now been mostly successfully integrated on a physical level, but racism still exists because they have not been accepted on an emotional level by everybody. “The Souls of Black Folk” is a step towards correcting these moral deficiencies some people still possess, but it doesn’t receive the widespread recognition it should simply because it wasn’t put into practice when it was first proposed. Should we also have never gradually begun to accept that the Earth isn’t flat? Booker T. Washington may have been a more important figure in his time than W.E.B. Du Bois, but I would argue that Du Bois’s ideas are infinitely more relevant today and should receive far more recognition than they do at present. Perhaps when Du Bois’s name is known to as many households as Washington’s, the last few steps to complete African American integration can finally be taken. In that sense, their different approaches are merely two halves of the same whole, and the futility in pitting them against each other is even more evident.