Civil Disobedience, Social Justice, Nationalism & Populism, Violent ...

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Civil Disobedience, Social Justice, Nationalism & Populism, Violent Demonstrations and Race Relations

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Summary Overview

Defining Moment

Author Biography

Document Analysis

Essential Themes

Bibliography and Further Reading

Ida B. Wells: "Booker T. Washington and His Critics"

by Gerald F. Goodwin, PhD, Cary D. Wintz, PhD

Date: 1904

Author: Ida B. Wells

Genre: article

Summary Overview

Ida Wells was deeply affected by racism and the violence inflicted by whites upon blacks in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an attempt to arouse the nation to confront its racial prejudices and barbaric actions, she began to write articles and pamphlets and to lecture widely both in this country and in Great Britain. Her vivid depictions of the horrors of lynching and her statistically supported discussion of that practice began the slow, arduous process toward public rejection of those crimes. Pulling no punches in her comments, Wells criticized both blacks and whites. Black elites, shielded by their wealth from many of the indignities of discrimination, ignored the problems of others in their communities. Black clergymen did not speak out strongly enough against segregation. Black politicians betrayed their race to seek the favor of whites. Whites accepted social myths and cultural stereotypes that allowed them to excuse inexcusable crimes against humanity.

Wells took it upon herself to wage a public crusade against the sufferings, indignities, and wrongs of an oppressed race. In her article "Booker T. Washington and His Critics," published in the World Today, she contests Washington's accommodationist philosophy, refusing to accept his measured and deferential approach to black advancement.

Defining Moment

Wells's scathing critique of Washington in "Booker T. Washington and his Critics" was clearly directed at an African American audience. Wells was not only upholding Washington's critics, she was also trying to convince his African American supporters that his policies were dangerous and that there



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were alternatives that were more likely to achieve success. African Americans should fight for access to all types of education and continue the fight for full political equality.

By linking Washington's advocacy of industrial education and refusal to oppose disenfranchisement of African Americans to the wants and desires of white southerners, Wells sought to discredit Washington in the eyes of the black community. Similarly, by pointing out the negative effect Washington's promotion of industrial education over more traditional forms of education, Wells demonstrated that his policies had consequences--the reduction of opportunities for African Americans.

Author Biography

Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. When her parents and a younger brother died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878, she accepted the first of several jobs as a rural schoolteacher to help support her six younger brothers and sisters. Success as a freelance writer eventually led to a career as a newspaper journalist and editor. Through newspaper articles and lectures, she quickly gained fame as a crusader against lynching. In addition to numerous newspaper and magazine articles, Wells is known for two pamphlets published in the 1890s--Southern Horrors and A Red Record. After marrying Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a Chicago newspaperman and civil rights advocate in 1895, Wells devoted much of her time to civic reform work. She also gained notoriety as an investigator into the causes of race riots. Wells disagreed philosophically with the accommodationist program advocated by Booker T. Washington. Although she was a signer of "The Call," a document inviting prominent black and white Americans to a conference that led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and was a founding member of that organization, she found it too accommodating to whites. Ida Wells-Barnett died in Chicago of uremia on March 25, 1931.

Wells confronted a racially divided South on numerous occasions. While traveling to her job as a schoolteacher, she experienced segregation firsthand when a railway conductor ordered her to move to a car reserved for "colored" passengers even though she had purchased a first-class ticket. She took her case to court and won, only to have the Tennessee Supreme Court overturn that decision. She lost her teaching job in 1891 because she wrote articles criticizing the poor quality of education given to black children in segregated schools. When three friends of hers were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892 and Wells publicly denounced their murders, the newspaper office of the Memphis Free Speech, of which she was editor and part owner, was destroyed by an angry white mob.



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After the Memphis incident, Wells began a lifelong crusade against lynching. Through newspaper articles in the New York Age and later in the Chicago Conservator and in lectures in the United States and Great Britain, she demanded that the United States confront lynching, which she termed "our national crime." Her two major pamphlets, Southern Horrors and A Red Record, offered detailed statistical information on lynching as well as her own controversial interpretation of the data presented. As Wells continued her public crusade against lynching, she began to investigate the causal factors behind race riots, which seemed to be on the rise in a number of the nation's major cities. She also began to devote much of her time to civic reform in Chicago and worked to persuade black women to become directly involved in organizational work for racial justice.

Defiant and confrontational throughout her life, Wells challenged the racial policies of both the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, openly debated Booker T. Washington on the proper course for black progress, and withdrew from the NAACP because she was not comfortable with its liberal white leadership. During the 1920s, a decade that saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, Wells became increasingly disillusioned with the state of race relations in America. Never a black separatist, she was drawn to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association during the 1920s because of his call for black selfhelp and economic independence and for instilling a new racial consciousness among African Americans. Feeling that she had lost her influence as a spokesperson for racial issues, Wells began writing her Autobiography. She was at work on the project when she died.

Historical Document

Industrial education for the Negro is Booker T. Washington's hobby. He believes that for the masses of the Negro race an elementary education of the brain and a continuation of the education of the hand is not only the best kind, but he knows it is the most popular with the white South. He knows also that the Negro is the butt of ridicule with the average white American, and that the aforesaid American enjoys nothing so much as a joke which portrays the Negro as illiterate and improvident; a petty thief or a happy-golucky inferior. . . .

[Booker T. Washington] knows, as do all students of sociology, that the representatives which stand as the type for any race, are chosen not from the worst but from the best specimens of that race; the achievements of the few rather than the poverty, vice and ignorance of the many, are the standards of any given race's ability. There is a Negro faculty at Tuskegee, some of whom came from the masses, yet have crossed lances with the best intellect of the dominant race at their best colleges. Mr. Washington knows intimately the ablest members of the race in all sections of the



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country and could bear testimony as to what they accomplished before the rage for industrial schools began. The Business League, of which he is founder and president, is composed of some men who were master tradesmen and business men before Tuskegee was born. He therefore knows better than any man before the public to-day that the prevailing idea of the typical Negro is false. . . .

The men and women of to-day . . . know that the leaders of the race, including Mr. Washington himself, are the direct product of schools of the Freedmen's Aid Society, the American Missionary Association and other such agencies which gave the Negro his first and only opportunity to secure any kind of education which his intellect and ambition craved. Without these schools our case would have been more hopeless indeed than it is; with their aid the race has made more remarkable intellectual and material progress in forty years than any other race in history. They have given us thousands of teachers for our schools in the South, physicians to heal our ailments, druggists, lawyers and ministers. . . .

That one of the most noted of their own race should join with the enemies to their highest progress in condemning the education they had received, has been to them a bitter pill. And so for a long while they keenly, though silently, resented the jibes against the college-bred youth which punctuate Mr. Washington's speeches. He proceeds to draw a moral therefrom for his entire race. The result is that the world which listens to him and which largely supports his educational institution, has almost unanimously decided that college education is a mistake for the Negro. They hail with acclaim the man who has made popular the unspoken thought of that part of the North which believes in the inherent inferiority of the Negro, and the always outspoken southern view to the same effect.

This gospel of work is no new one for the Negro. It is the South's old slavery practice in a new dress. It was the only education the South gave the Negro for two and a half centuries she had absolute control of his body and soul. The Negro knows that now, as then, the South is strongly opposed to his learning anything else but how to work.

No human agency can tell how many black diamonds lie buried in the black belt of the South, and the opportunities for discovering them become rarer every day as the schools for thorough training become more cramped and no more are being established. The presidents of Atlanta University and other such schools remain in the North the year round, using their personal influence to secure funds to keep these institutions running. Many are like the late Collis P. Huntington, who had given large amounts to Livingston College, Salisbury, North Carolina. Several years before his death he told the president of that institution that as he believed Booker Washington was educating Negroes in the only sensible way, henceforth his money for that purpose would go to Tuskegee. All the schools in the South have suffered



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as a consequence of this general attitude, and many of the oldest and best which have regarded themselves as fixtures now find it a struggle to maintain existence. . . .

Admitting for argument's sake that its system is the best, Tuskegee could not accommodate one-hundredth part of the Negro youth who need education. The Board of Education of New Orleans cut the curriculum in the public schools for Negro children down to the fifth grade, giving Mr. Washington's theory as an inspiration for so doing. Mr. Washington denied in a letter that he had ever advocated such a thing, but the main point is that this is the deduction the New Orleans school board made from his frequent statement that previous systems of education were a mistake and that the Negro should be taught to work. Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, the other day in his inaugural address, after urging the legislature to abolish the Negro public school and substitute manual training therefor, concluded that address by saying that all other education was a curse to the Negro race.

This is the gospel Mr. Washington has preached for the past decade. The results from this teaching then would seem to be, first, a growing prejudice in northern institutions of learning against the admission of Negro students; second, a contracting of the number and influence of the schools of higher learning so judiciously scattered through all the southern states by the missionary associations, for the Negroes benefit; third, lack of a corresponding growth of industrial schools to take their places; and fourth, a cutting down of the curriculum for the Negro in the public schools of the large cities of the South, few of which ever have provided high schools for the race.

Mr. Washington's reply to his critics is that he does not oppose the higher education, and offers in proof of this statement his Negro faculty. But the critics observe that nowhere does he speak for it, and they can remember dozens of instances when he has condemned every system of education save that which teaches the Negro how to work. They feel that the educational opportunities of the masses, always limited enough, are being threatened by this retrogression. . . .

There are many who can never be made to feel that it was a mistake thirty years ago to give the unlettered freedmen the franchise, their only weapon of defense, any more than it is a mistake to have fire for cooking and heating purposes in the home, because ignorant or careless servants sometimes burn themselves. The thinking Negro knows it is still less a mistake to-day when the race has had thirty years of training for citizenship. It is indeed a bitter pill to feel that much of the unanimity with which the nation to-day agrees to Negro disfranchisement comes from the general acceptance of Mr. Washington's theories.



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