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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
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Chapter 35. The Negro Protest 743
mg the Negro protest. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois
became national symbols for these two main streams of Negro thought.
Two groups of followers assembled behind them.
Between these two groups there were incessant attacks and counter-attacks; the
former declaring that the latter were visionaries, doctrinaires, and incendiaries; the
latter charging the former with minimizing political and civil rights, with encouraging
opposition to higher training and higher opportunities for Negro youth, with giving
sanction to certain prejudiced practices and attitudes toward the Negro, thus yielding
up in fundamental principles more than could be balanced by any immediate gains
One not familiar with this phase of Negro life in the twelve—or fourteen—^yeai
period following 1903 (the year of publication of Th^ Souls of Black Folk) cannot
imagine the bitterness of the antagonism between these two wings.^^
Ray Stannard Baker, writing in 1908, observed: “It has come, indeed, to
the point where most Negroes of any intelligence at all have taken their
place on one side or the other.’’^^
During this period, a pattern of Negro thinking and Negro controversy
became established. I have found—^particularly in the South, where condi-
tions have changed less than in the North—that this discussion still goes
on among intellectual and professional Negroes in much the same terms
as at the beginning of the century.®
The agitation did not, for a long time, seriously encroach upon Booker
T. Washington’s power position. But he had increasingly to concede a
place before the Negro public to astute critics of his conciliatory policy and
to proponents of a more militant course of action. And he had to watch
his own words and deeds carefully. He had, thereafter, to reckon not only
with reactions from the whites, but also with reactions from the Negroes.
As he grew older he increasingly took on symbolic dignity in his personal
appearance. He also became more interested in stressing the principal
demands of Negroes for ultimate equality. The irritation between the two
groups remained, but when he died in 1915 he had moved considerably
toward his opponents. And he knew that he no longer spoke alone for
the whole Negro people. Robert R. Moton, his successor as head of the
Tuskegee Institute—and symbolic conservative Negro leader in the eyes
of the whites—could still less claim to be the sole Negro leader. Also,
under the influence both of the criticism from the Du Bois group and of
much changed conditions, he came increasingly to move toward an ideology
which incorporated and expressed the Negro protest in cautious but no
uncertain terms. Du Bois, on his side, had become prepared to accept
“ Commenting upon this observation recently, a prominent Negro social scientist, well
acquainted with Negro education in the South, remarked that the Washington-Du Bois con-
troversy gives the Negro teacher in Southern high schools and colleges, where he has to
watch carefully all his words, a protective historical front and an irreproachable excuse
for discussing Negro policy with his studenu^
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