Ida B. Wells | A Critique of Booker T. Washington, 1904

Industrial education for the Negro is Booker T. Washington's hobby. He believes that for the masses of the Negro race an elementary education of the brain and a continuation of the education of the hand is not only the best kind, but he knows it is the most popular with the white South. He knows also that the Negro is the butt of ridicule with the average white American, and that the aforesaid American enjoys nothing so much as a joke which portrays the Negro as illiterate and improvident [shortsighted]; a petty thief or a happy-go-lucky inferior. . . .

There are many who can never be made to feel that it was a mistake thirty years ago to give the unlettered freedman the franchise, their only weapon of defense, any more than it was a mistake to have fire for cooking and heating purposes in the home, because ignorant or careless servants sometimes burn themselves. . . .

Does this mean that the Negro objects to industrial education? By no means. It simply means that he knows by sad experience that industrial education will not stand him in place of political, civil and intellectual liberty, and he objects to being deprived of fundamental rights of American citizenship to the end that one school for industrial training shall flourish. To him it seems like selling a race's birthright for a mess of pottage.

Source: Ida B. Wells, “The Negro Problem from the Negro Point of View,” World Today, April 1904, 518, 520, 521.