Rethinking Booker T. and W. E. B.

Leader

Kenneth R. Janken
Professor, African and Afro-American Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
National Humanities Center Fellow

About the Seminar

In one lesson plan after another, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois forever stand opposed. In the late nineteenth century both sought uplift for African Americans, but one believed it came through accommodation and manual training, while the other urged resistance and the liberal arts.

Is that the entire story? Was Washington a narrow, uncreative booster of commercialism or a savvy politician who correctly read what late nineteenth-century America would afford its black citizens? Was Du Bois a heroic intellectual activist or a narrow elitist whose path to uplift was open only to the “Talented Tenth”?

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Assigned Readings

1. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, Chapter 8: "Teaching School in a Stable and a Hen-House". Also the Reading Guide from "The Making of African American Identity: Vol. II, 1865-1917".
2. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, Chapter 14: "The Atlanta Exposition Address". Also the Reading Guide from "The Making of African American Identity: Vol. II, 1865-1917".
3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 3: "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others".
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Education and Work," The Journal of Negro Education 1 (1932): 60-74
5. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Mr. Booker T. Washington and His Critics" (1904), in Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington with Related Documents, edited with an introduction by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, 217-21
6. Dudley Randall, "Booker T. and W.E.B."

Suggested Additional Resources

1. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, Chapters 10 and 12
2. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, introduction to Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington with Related Documents
3. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought, Chapter 9