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 4 of 40)
46. W.E.B.Du Bois, author of "The Talented Tenth" and "The Soul of Black Folks" definitely had the better of his debate with Booker T. Washington. The latter believed that freed slaves were not ready for the standard education given to whites. He believed it was better for them to learn to use a toothbrush, to learn to be artisans and railroad porters until American attitudes on race gradually reformed themselves, which he thought would take 50 years or so. He made a famous speech to whites in Atlanta, saying that in social affairs, blacks and whites could remain as separate as the fingers of a hand, but in national affairs, could function with the unity of a single hand.
Du Bois thought that at least a tenth of blacks could be "eduacated" just as whites are. With such a policy, within a generation every black would have a child, a brother or a close acquaintance who was a well-educated black man. The updraft socially would function like a social blast furnace, pulling the race into intellectual and social harmony and parity with whites.
Unfortunately, Washington come to be famous at the same time as John Dewey began to push "progressive education", which is actually "socialist education" and it has resulted in the massive dumbing down and near destruction of our society.
If we survive, we will all come to think of education the way Du Bois did. However, it is hard to rank him as the greatest black American. He became a communist, renounced his American citizenship, and died in Ghana in 1963.
Bob at 7:40PM on Jan 19th 2008
47. Maybe I'm the asshole, but I thought African-American meant you were from Africa and had immigrated to the US. Same as any 'slash' American.
That being said Dinesh is an Indian-American and has no CLUE what it is like to be a black AMERICAN.
I don't either, and would not hazzard to guess who is the greatest.
I do know Douglass encouraged blacks of his day to accept what they were given, keep quiet and PRAY... ( as if god cared!)
Interesting omission of Malcom X, a contemporary of MLK. Maybe a little to millitant for DD, or perhaps he dare not mention a muslim in a good light, lest he piss off his fundie cronies.
Just my thoughts. I could be wrong, I have been before.
mac at 7:50PM on Jan 19th 2008
48. I leave for one hour, and this is what I come back to. :>)
Where I live in Virginia, one in 40 houses is in foreclosure. I'd call that an economic problem.
And if I were at a cocktail party, I would steer clear of folks who think that: 1. One must accept JC as their lord and savior 2. Those athiests who refuse to have any sort of interest in the mystical and paranormal. Freud was an athiest, but Jung accepted all religions as having some validity.
As for the Greatest African American...I sort of admire General Colin Powell.
The Goddess Athena at 7:56PM on Jan 19th 2008
49. recant
I agree with NPBF, Ali said he was the greatest, who am I to argue with tewh champ.
mac at 7:55PM on Jan 19th 2008
50. The Goddess Athena say, "And if I were at a cocktail party..."
A cocktail party, you don't say... ghost-busting must pay big bucks! I gotta tell ya Goddess, if I were to become a billionaire overnight household name celebrity... the only way you'd be seeing me at a cockail pah-tay is if it were a combination funeral and I was the corpse!
Ya don't really suppose that anyone gives a flying-fart if you don't imagine atheists to be 'amusing' now, do you, you scam artist!?
not-pboyfloyd at 8:19PM on Jan 19th 2008
51. ATHEIST
reply to: Just because you have never seen a UFO or a demon does not mean that it does not exist.
________________
Demonic spirits do NOT exist.
They are a STORY. We know where the STORY comes from.
Let me put it this way. IF demonic spirits were real, no one would ever be able to gather enough information about them to write a story.
The fact that Demons are mentioned in the New Testament.... means... somebody MADE UP a STORY about Jesus in order to give him supernatural powers to rival those that other competing religions bragged about.
I mean, if there are 4 different religions in a country 200 miles away... and all of their priests claim the power to command demonic spirits.... what are you going to do?
Dishonest people.... will make up a story where Jesus commanded demonic spirits... because their ONLY goal is to recruit new victims.
UFOs.
Eveything I said before stands, EXCEPT....
if UFOs are real, there's a good way to PROVE it. Shoot one down. Put the crash site on the NBC Evening News.
So far, that hasn't happened.
There is NO EVIDENCE of UFOs. Therefore, I proportion my belief according to the evidence.
There is NO EVIDENCE that Jesus was anything more than an ordinary human being. The Gospels are obviously LIES, written to make THEIR GUY sound as important as "Enoch" in the "Book of Enoch" or a dozen other Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus.
William Hays at 8:21PM on Jan 19th 2008
52. GHOSTLY bump!(in the night)
not-pboyfloyd at 8:21PM on Jan 19th 2008
53. Hey, my 'bump' got bumped!! Ghost in the machine, I suppose!
not-pboyfloyd at 8:29PM on Jan 19th 2008
54. I couldn't agree more, Dinesh.
You could also have added the responsibility that white liberals have had on the fate of African Americans today: They keep on telling them that they are victims of systematic racism when they aren't. And they do so because liberals do not want to DO GOOD, TO BE JUST, they just want to LOOK GOOD, TO LOOK JUST. It is a life of appearances.
It is sad, and it is dangerous!
Thanks for another great article!
Felipe Miguel at 9:15PM on Jan 19th 2008
55. @ Felipe Miguel ...
.. where is this mysterious transcendental liberal telling black people stuff... filling there heads with liberal nonsense... where's he at...let me at 'im!!
not-pboyfloyd at 9:17PM on Jan 19th 2008
56. great -
what's 'great' supposed to mean other than 'popular'.
Denise likes washington because today he'd be an uncle tom.
it's the uncle tom part that appeals to him - he wasn't what denise would probably think as 'uppity' - not knowing his place or knowing where he'd been put and not liking it.
From the pearl of indyah's pov, if you don't like the system to begin with and you are intent on destroying democracy, the more Uncle Toms you have, the better off you are.
What he likes is the slavishness, not the man's contributions to society as though nobody saw through that.
I guess he canned his neocalvinist suicide pact post, but what he came back with was just as odious.
Clif Kuplen at 9:25PM on Jan 19th 2008
57. "And they do so because liberals do not want to DO GOOD, TO BE JUST, they just want to LOOK GOOD, TO LOOK JUST. It is a life of appearances." -FELIPE
Oh please,
Liberals think that in order TO BE JUST, you must DO GOOD. Conservatives try to LOOK GOOD to LOOK JUST in order to please god. Then they get caught in bathroom stalls doing very "Liberal food rubbing"
I am a liberal and I believe we should be thinking of energy solutions,
create global warming solutions,
provide every man woman and child excellent education,
provide a healthcare plan that will cover all citizens (every life is valuable, no exceptions!)
bring our troops home, you can't go invading all countries who have terrorists!
Bring the dollar back!
goddess1prevail at 9:41PM on Jan 19th 2008
58. Felipe
How many of the worlds richest are African American?
Isn't that probably systematic?
goddess1prevail at 9:50PM on Jan 19th 2008
59. To all you atheists out there: You, my friends, are the ultimate losers. You will live forever, like it or not, it's just up to you to choose where to spend eternity. If you believe in nothing you are surely condemned. I've heard of many atheists who suddenly became "born again" when the end is nearing. You, too, will have that chance. We got plenty of room for ya'll on the Good Guy's side.
And about the article: Even though I am white, I think this is the ultimate compliment to blacks to rank Dr. King third on his list. There have been many great blacks in this country.
jamie p. at 9:53PM on Jan 19th 2008
60. Leave it to Dinesh to taint MLK 's legacy. And as far as his oppositionm to the Vietnam war and his support for the working class in america he was right on. It's conservatives like yourself that would have left the blacks "in their place" for maybe another century because it does not fit the staus quo's vision. Like the church leaders that told MLK to take his time and not push so hard, you would have hindered his progress. Well a 100 years after they were supposedly free was more than long enough. You must know that you are making a living as Rush and Ann Coulter and the other far right people do by sucking up to the conservative elite and telling them what they want to hear. Should you wander to the left you will find jobs tough to get.
Rick at 9:59PM on Jan 19th 2008