580 Chapter 21 The Age of Reform
continually survives and persists, continually aspires,
continually shows itself in thrift and ability and char-
acter.” Du Bois, moreover, prided himself on being of
mixed races.
Whatever his prejudices, Du Bois exposed both the
weaknesses of Washington’s strategy and the callous-
ness of white American attitudes. Accommodation was
not working. Washington was praised, even lionized by
prominent southern whites, yet when Theodore
Roosevelt invited him to a meal at the White House
they exploded with indignation, and Roosevelt,
although not personally prejudiced, meekly back-
tracked, never repeating his “mistake.” He defended
his record by saying, “I have stood as valiantly for the
rights of the negro as any president since Lincoln.”
That, sad to relate, was true enough.
Not mere impatience but despair led Du Bois
and a few like-minded blacks to meet at Niagara
Falls in July 1905 and to issue a stirring list of
demands: the unrestricted right to vote, an end to
every kind of segregation, equality of economic
opportunity, higher education for the talented,
equal justice in the courts, and an end to trade-
union discrimination. This Niagara movementdid
not attract mass support, but it did stir the con-
sciences of some whites, many of them the descen-
dants of abolitionists, who were also becoming
disenchanted by the failure of accommodation to
provide blacks with real opportunity.
In 1909, the centennial of the birth of Abraham
Lincoln, a group of these liberals, including the news-
paperman Oswald Garrison Villard (grandson of
William Lloyd Garrison), the social worker Jane
Addams, the philosopher John Dewey, and the novel-
ist William Dean Howells, founded the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). The organization was dedicated
to the eradication of racial discrimination. Its leader-
ship was predominantly white in the early years, but
Du Bois became a national officer and the editor of its
journal, The Crisis.
A turning point had been reached. After 1909
virtually every important leader, white and black
alike, rejected the Washington approach. More and
more, blacks turned to the study of their past in an
effort to stimulate pride in their heritage. In 1915
Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the
Study of Negro Life and History; the following year
he began editing the Journal of Negro History, which
became the major publishing organ for scholarly stud-
ies on the subject.
This militancy produced few results in the
Progressive Era. Theodore Roosevelt behaved no dif-
ferently than earlier Republican presidents; he courted
blacks when he thought it advantageous, and turnedWashington’s “attitude of adjustment and submis-
sion” to polite but searching criticism. Washington
had asked blacks to give up political power, civil
rights, and the hope of higher education, not realiz-
ing that “voting is necessary to modern manhood,
that... discrimination is barbarism, and that black
boys need education as well as white boys.”
Washington “apologizes for injustice,” Du Bois
charged. “He belittles the emasculating effects of
caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training
and ambitions of our brightest minds.” Du Bois
deemed this totally wrong: “The way for a people to
gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily
throwing them away.”
Du Bois was not an uncritical admirer of the ordi-
nary American black. He believed that “immorality,
crime, and laziness” were common vices. Quite
properly he blamed the weaknesses of blacks on the
treatment afforded them by whites, but his approach
to the solution of racial problems was frankly elitist.
“The Negro race,” he wrote, “is going to be saved by
its exceptional men,” what he called the “talented
tenth” of the black population. After describing in
vivid detail how white mistreatment had corrupted
his people, Du Bois added loftily, “A saving remnant
A striking likeness of W.E.B. Du Bois drawn by Winold Reiss when
Du Bois was in his fifties.