Who is the greatest African American of the past hundred years? Who was the most prophetic about civil rights concerns for the twenty-first century? Not Martin Luther King. I would have to rank him second or third. The greatest and most prophetic figure was Booker T. Washington. To see why, we have to revisit an early twentieth-century debate between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Although the debate focused on black Americans, it is relevant to the question of how any group starting out at the bottom can advance in society.
DuBois, a distinguished scholar and co-founder of the civil rights organization NAACP, argued that blacks in America face one big problem, and it is racism. Washington, who was born a slave but went on to become head of the Tuskegee Institute, countered that blacks face two big problems. One is racism, he conceded. The other, he said, is African American cultural disadvantage. Washington contended that black crime rates were too high, black savings rates were too low, there were too many broken families, blacks did not have enough respect for educational achievement, and so on.
DuBois insisted that these problems, if they existed, were due to the legacy of slavery and racism. Washington did not entirely disagree, but he insisted that, whatever their source, these cultural problems demanded attention. What is the point of having rights, Washington said, without the ability to exercise those rights and compete effectively with other groups? To put the matter in contemporary terms, there is little benefit in having a right to a job at Microsoft if you don't have the skills to get and perform the job. Washington further implied that if these cultural deficiencies were not remedied, they would help to strengthen racism by giving it an empirical foundation.
The civil rights movement, led by the NAACP and later Martin Luther King, fought for decades to implement the DuBois program and secure basic rights for black Americans. This was a necessary campaign, and ultimately it was successful. The laws were changed, and blacks achieved their goal of legal equality and full citizenship. Other minorities (and I count myself in this group) also benefited from the doors that King and his fellow activists opened. Obviously issues of enforcement remain, but by the late 1960s the early civil rights agenda represented by DuBois and King had been largely achieved. At this crucial juncture, the civil rights movement should have moved to embrace the Booker T. Washington agenda.
Unfortunately this didn't happen. It still hasn't happened. Even today Jesse Jackson and the NAACP continue (in the famous words of Frederick Douglass) to "agitate, agitate, agitate" for black progress. But now there are hardly any Bull Connors and Southern segregationists to fight, and so the activists are reduced to fighting "covert racism" and "institutional racism" and "racism that has gone underground" and basically racism that is only visible to them and to no one else. Most significant, these fights do little to help the blacks who are the poorest, the group that sociologist William Julius Wilson termed "the truly disadvantaged."
Meanwhile, there is another group that is following the Booker T. Washington strategy, and that is the nonwhite immigrants. I don't just mean the Koreans and the Asian Indians; I also mean black immigrants--the West Indians, the Haitians, the Nigerians, and so on. All are darker in complexion than African Americans, and yet racism does not seem to stop them. The immigrants know that racism today is no longer systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to find ways to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start out at the very bottom have shown that they are make rapid gains. These groups are surging ahead of African Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves. West Indians, for instance, have established a strong business and professional community and have achieved income parity with whites.
How is this possible? The nonwhite immigrants don't spend a lot of time meditating about the hardships of the past, nor do they blame their circumstances on society. They recognize that education and entrepreneurship are the fastest ladders to success in America. They push their children to study, so that they will be admitted to Berkeley and MIT, and they pool their resources and set up small businesses, so that they can make some money and move to the suburbs.
Thus we find that any group trying to move up in America is confronted with two possible strategies--the DuBois strategy and the Washington strategy---and it is an empirical question as to which one works better. A century ago, when segregation was still the rule, clearly the DuBois strategy was better. In this sense, Booker T. Washington was wrong during his day. But today it's clear that the man was ahead of his time. So far the evidence is overwhelming that the immigrant approach of assimilating to the cultural strategies of success is vastly better for group uplift than the tired old strategy of "agitate, agitate, agitate."
Martin Luther King nobly led the first phase of the struggle, but he only dimly saw the next stage. At the time of his death King was peddling all kinds of impractical schemes for sharing the wealth and he also became unnecessarily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement which diluted his currency as a civil rights leader. Even so, there were moments when King was prescient about the future. At one point he said that ultimately every man must write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation. I take him to mean that we all have the right to be treated equally under the law. We have this right, but we don't have any more rights than this. What we do with our rights, what we make of ourselves, the script that we write of our own lives, this finally is up to us.
Postscript: This article has been loosely adapted from my book What's So Great About America. The issues it raises are exhaustively treated in one of my earlier books, The End of Racism.
Reader Comments ( Page 2 of 40)
16. I think some of the people leaving comments need to read and reply to article at hand, and not bring in outside points that have nothing to do with this. The author's religous points of view and reasoning why he thinks Jesus was an exorcist have no importance toward this article. I thinks he wrote this article well, and makes many valid points, even though I must agree with first person that ranking civil right leaders is rather dangerous. I think that there is racism alive today, but by much less effect than it was merely 40 years ago. The past is the past, and we must learn from every horrible thing that happened against blacks, Jews, Hispanics, the disabled, etc. But a person success is ultimately left up to that person. It may sound cliche, but it's not were a person is from, but it is where that person is going. I agree with D'Souza in this article because I've met many people of all colors and background use what ever happened to them as an excuse to not move forward in their lives, and just live as the victims. It is a new millenium, it's time for all of us - even African Americans - to stop perpetuating racism and prejudice, and uplift ourselves so we can all finally be judged on the content of our character.
Krystal at 3:59PM on Jan 19th 2008
17. Ms. Krystal,
Racism, sexism, religious intolerance, etc. will always be with us. History and human behavior is not linear, but circular in nature. The Salem witch trials happened in the 1600's. Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci (who invented the flying machine) lived in the 1500's. Aristotle lived in 300 B.C.
Society can and has swung backwards into ignorance many times. Epidemics of disease and starvation can do it, Ice ages can do it, wars can do it.
The Goddess Athena at 4:16PM on Jan 19th 2008
18. The "greatest African-American" in history? Well, duh, big guy. Tiger Woods, of course. And Mr. Hayes, you get the lifetime AOL blogging award. And why do you work so hard trying to debunk the supernatural? Methinks you doth protest too much.
Dave at 4:17PM on Jan 19th 2008
19. http://evolutionfacts.blogspot.com
FORMER ATHEIST at 4:24PM on Jan 19th 2008
20. Goddess Athena:
What in the world are you talking about when you say most people in America can't make a decent living at anything? Do you live in America?
kulari94 at 4:24PM on Jan 19th 2008
21. http://atheistsareimaginary.blogspot.com
AN ATHEIST NO MORE at 4:25PM on Jan 19th 2008
22. Hey former atheist,
Stick with the topic and quite posting your link to the evolution facts page.
That site is laughable at best, with many misspellings and translations. From the genesis accounts being true to the names of El it is all researched wrong. You prove your stupidity every time you post that unrepeatable silly site.
goddess1prevail at 4:37PM on Jan 19th 2008
23. For a wonder, I (mostly) agree with DD. I know too many African-Americans who are not willing to do for themselves; I also know a few who do, and succeed in life.
As for the other stuff, the dogmatic athiests are just as bad as the Creationists for closed minds. What is wrong with reasonable open minded investigation?
JimD at 4:49PM on Jan 19th 2008
24. 15. Goddess Athena:
What in the world are you talking about when you say most people in America can't make a decent living at anything? Do you live in America?
kulari94 at 4:24PM on Jan 19th 2008
-------------------------------
What country do YOU live in? In your mythical land all are employed, all are wealthy, all are republicans (I bet...)
You apparently have never left your condo. My wife works for DCYF, and I hear the horrors. Kids are dying out there, and you're happily sucking on america's teat.
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:52PM on Jan 19th 2008
25. Watch this short video that proves that the Bible is REPULSIVE!!!
I dedicate this to "a former atheist" or
an atheist no more" or whatever he's calling himself today, and to his incredibly stupid pet website. And I'll do my best to post it every single time that he posts his, to honor his unflinching commitment to repulsive lunacy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkXOwBIRX7Y&feature=related
Godless Heathen Brian at 4:57PM on Jan 19th 2008
26. Leave it to an "expert" in their own mind to rank who was the greatest Black American. I think that ranking is a bad idea, however I place the contributions of Dr. King and Dr. DuBois ahead of Mr. Washington today, yesterday and tomorrow. Mr. Washington promoted a philosophy similar to the one also used in South Africa to keep a race of people oppressed. And your opinion about racism that you don't think exists anymore except as episodes, deserves a respond using the words of Bill Clinton, it's a "fairy tale". Bussta Brown at http://www.leadershipcultivation.com
Bussta Brown at 5:05PM on Jan 19th 2008
27. Quite frankly, it's obvious why our country is in so much trouble. The overwhelming majority of these posts were written by people who are either completely nuts, totally ignorant, or dumber than a middle class white kid. Unlike the other immigrants who volunteerily came to America and retained their native cultural identities, the African-Americans lost theirs and was replaced by a rebellious one as a consequence to over two hundred years of enslavement. Hence, they have become a divided sub-culture, struggling between those that aspire to achieve the American dream and those that reject the idea of having to become white to achieve it.
gshort3011 at 5:04PM on Jan 19th 2008
28. On atheist no more's little christian website there they have PROOF of noah's ark! Pictures even! Whoa... Too bad it looks like a rock formation, but whoa....
PROOF of an impossibility? Never gonna happen, christians!
Hard to believe that people actually still believe the ark story. It'd have to be the size of manhattan and would have it's own food chain... Everything would be eating everything else! And all the insects and all the reptiles and amphibians... Not to mention all th special needs of different animals; heat lamps, special diets, specific temperature ranges... Grylloblattid ice insects die from the heat of a human hand, and somehow they made the trip? All the freshwater fishes would die when the (brackish? salt?) water iverran the land, and even if they lived somehow how did they get back to their respective lakes and rivers and ponds aftrewards? And how did they get all the marsupials back to australia, and all the right carnivores back to africa, india, sumatra, the NEW WORLD, and all their other respective places of origin? How'd they get the jaguars back to South America? Or how did all those animals from all over the world appear at the ark to be taken along in the first place? God's Animal Chariot? What about rain forest animals that are dependant upon local vegetation or certain specific plants to survive? What about ALL the terrestrial plants that for obvious reasons couldn't be on the ark? They wouldn't survive 40 days submerged.
And finally, why no record of a world-wide flood in the rock strata showing sedimentation?
There's just about a million reasons why it's impossible. As it's described, it couldn't happen. It really couldn't happen in any way at all.
Godless Heathen Brian at 5:17PM on Jan 19th 2008
29. Wasn't he the leader of Booker T. and the M.G.s ?
BOB JOHNSON at 5:17PM on Jan 19th 2008
30. Dr Martin Luther King was a very religous man. Most of you must hate that about him.
Tsar Nicholas II at 5:28PM on Jan 19th 2008