Black Militancy 579reburied in a segregated cemetery;
in Virginia in 1902 the daughter of
Robert E. Lee was arrested for rid-
ing in the black section of a railroad
car. “Insult is being added to injury
continually,” a black journalist in
Alabama complained. “Have those
in power forgotten that there is a
God?”
Many progressive women, still
smarting from the insult to their sex
entailed in the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments and eager to
attract southern support for their
campaign for the vote, adopted racist
arguments. They contrasted the sup-
posed corruption and incompetence
of black voters with their own
“purity” and intelligence. Southern
progressives of both sexes argued
that disfranchising blacks would
reduce corruption by removing from
unscrupulous white politicians the
temptation to purchase black votes!
The typical southern attitude
toward the education of blacks was
summed up in a folk proverb:
“When you educate a Negro, you spoil a good field
hand.” In 1910 only about 8,000 black children in
the entire South were attending high schools.
Despite the almost total suppression of black rights,
lynchings persisted; between 1900 and 1914 more
than 1,100 blacks were murdered by mobs, most
(but not all) in the southern states. In the rare cases
in which local prosecutors brought the lynchers to
trial, juries almost without exception brought in ver-
dicts of not guilty.
Booker T. Washington was shaken by this trend,
but he could find no way to combat it. The times
were passing him by. He appealed to his white
southern “friends” for help but got nowhere.
Increasingly he talked about the virtues of rural life,
the evils of big cities, and the uselessness of higher
education for black people. By the turn of the cen-
tury a number of young, well-educated blacks, most
of them Northerners, were breaking away from his
accommodationist leadership.
“Events in Paris, Texas,” from Ida B. Wells,
A Red Recordatwww.myhistorylab.com
Black Militancy
William E. B. Du Bois was the most prominent of
the militants. Du Bois was born in Great
Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. His father, a
ReadtheDocumentOn May 15, 1916, after deliberating for one hour, an all-white jury in Waco, Texas, found
seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington guilty of bludgeoning a white woman to death. A mob
rushed him out of the courtroom, chained him to a tree, and burned him to death. The story
was chronicled by Patricia Bernstein in The First Waco Horror(2005).restless wanderer of Negro and French Huguenot
stock, abandoned the family, and young William
grew up on the edge of poverty. Neither accepted
nor openly rejected by the overwhelmingly white
community, he devoted himself to his studies, show-
ing such brilliance that his future education was
ensured by scholarships: to Fisk University, then to
Harvard, and then to the University of Berlin. In
1895 Du Bois became the first American black to
earn a PhD in history from Harvard; his disserta-
tion, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade
(1896), remains a standard reference.
Personal success and “acceptance” by whites did
not make the proud and sensitive Du Bois compla-
cent. Outraged by white racism and the willingness of
many blacks to settle for second-class citizenship, he
set out to make American blacks proud of their
color—“Beauty is black,” he said—and of their
African origins and culture.
Like Washington, Du Bois wanted blacks to lift
themselves up by their own bootstraps. They must
establish their own businesses, run their own newspa-
pers and colleges, and write their own literature; they
must preserve their identity rather than seek to amal-
gamate themselves into a society that offered them
only crumbs and contempt. At first he cooperated
with Washington, but in 1903, in the essay “Of
Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” he subjected