Addressing Racial Inequality
By the end of the nineteenth century, the former Confederate states had stripped most blacks of the right to vote and instituted legal forms of segregation. In the face of violence, hostility, and widespread discrimination, African American leaders Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells developed alternative approaches to the problem of racial inequality. Washington emphasized accommodation within the existing social and political system, whereas Wells insisted that blacks must secure the right to vote.
Booker T. Washington | The Atlanta Compromise, 1895
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.
. . . I pledge that in your [white race] effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
Source: Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work (Cincinnati: W. W. Ferguson, 1900), 170–71.
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.
Interpret the Evidence
Why does Washington believe that economic development is the key to racial progress?
How does Wells challenge Washington’s agenda? Why does she insist that industrial education is not enough and political and social reforms are essential to black economic progress?
Put It in Context
How do Washington and Wells reflect, in different ways, the status of African Americans in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century?
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