Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey were three giants of African American leadership in the late 19th century and the early 20th century; they offer supreme contrasts in the pursuit of full citizenship rights for African America that endured as motifs of the 20th century:
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born a slave on a small plantation in Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, he secured the friendship of benevolent whites in his home state (especially in the General Lewis Rutherford family, for whom he served as houseboy), learned to read and write, and trained at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. At Hampton, Washington was deeply influenced by the institution’s director, General Samuel Armstrong, who stressed the improvement of African American lives through cleanliness, thrift, morality, character, and proficiency in the manual trades. In 1881, Booker T. Washington was, upon the recommendation of General Armstrong, tapped to head the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, established with a curriculum very similar to that at Hampton. As an advocate of what may be called the gradualist approach, Washington counseled African Americans to forego the pursuit of full political and social rights and to accept segregation for the time being, taking training as bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and stone masons so as to thrive economically on the basis of terms laid down by Jim Crow. He thus advised his fellows to build thriving communities of black citizens capable of convincing even the heaviest doubters and most virulently racist in white society of their diligence and trustworthiness. The gradualist approach articulated by Washington urged African Americans to get a good basic education, master their trades, demonstrate solid citizenship and to go about their lives in ways that converted whites to friendship over time, and thus through self-help to be so successful as to undermine the assumptions of Jim Crow and to eventually end the system of that venal creature.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) came of age in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, went southward to earn a B. A. degree (1888) at Fisk University, in Nashville, and then came back to New England to study at Harvard. At Harvard, Dubois earned another B. A. (1890), an M. A. (1891), and a Ph. D. (1895). Growing up in Great Barrington and finding his academic grounding at Harvard, Du Bois in both cases operated on Massachusetts turf that was relatively hospitable to the formation of an optimistic integrationist doctrine. Du Bois was the leader of the Niagara Movement, which gained momentum in the aftermath of a meeting at Niagara Falls in 1905. Key participants in this meeting went on to found the National Negro Committee on 12 February 1909. The multiracial founders of this organization, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling soon changed the name to the enduring appellation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP gave prime attention to legal rights, especially those related to the pursuit of education. For this purpose, the NAACP established the Legal Defense Fund to litigate cases in local, state, and federal courts. The NAACP published a journal, Crisis, which disseminated information about legal issues, court cases, and topics of grave concern, such as the continuing specter of vigilante violence and the brutal lynchings still haunting the southern landscape. The integrationist ideas of W. E. B. DuBois motivated and catalyzed all of these activities. W. E. B. DuBois and all of those advocating an integrationist approach believed in the ideals of the United States Constitution, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice according to those ideals, and demanded the full exercise of citizenship in all of its dimensions: political, economic, and social. DuBois had a major platform for advancing his ideas as head of the NAACP and as editor of Crisis.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was born and grew up in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of Sarah and Marcus Garvey. The latter was a stonemason who seemingly was descended from the Maroons, the African slaves who escaped and successfully defended themselves against Spaniards and the British in the 17th century. Marcus the son took great pride in the Maroon heritage of Marcus the father. Faced with financial difficulties, Garvey had to leave school at the age of fourteen, thereafter educating himself through hard work, wide reading, and travels to Central and South America. During 1912-1914, Garvey lived in London, meeting people from the African continent for the first time and coming under the influence of the Epyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali. In London, Garvey wrote for the latter’s publications, African Times and Oriental Review, reinforcing his association with his mentor’s views. He also gained great inspiration from the philosophy of black self-help that he found in his initial encounter with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. In 1914, at the age of 27, Garvey returned to Jamaica and formed an all-black organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey moved his residence and place of operations to New York in 1917. Garvey advanced the view that there was no use in trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white people, because almost all white people harbored racist thoughts and were incorrigible. People in the Americas of African descent should unite, work hard to make an all-black nation within a nation economically strong, and in time transplant the nation to Africa. Garvey published his ideas in the UNIA’s journal, Negro World, launched numerous programs and enterprises, including a Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line of ships for transporting people across the Atlantic who sought return to Africa, and in 1920 Garvey led the first UNIA International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. A subcommittee from among the 25,000 attendees issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro People of the World. Amid controversy over the handling of investors’ money in the Black Star Line, the United States government deported Garvey back to Jamaica; from there Garvey traveled to and settled in Great Britain, where he advocated his ideas until the end of his days in 1940.
These, then, were the three key approaches to attaining a life of civic dignity for people of African descent in the United States: gradualist, integrationist, and nationalist:
Washington’s ideas over time were absorbed by both of the other strains, which adopted some version of the gradualist self-help approach into their advocacy.
The other two approaches came to offer disparate routes to the achievement of African American citizenship during the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s:
The integrationist approach would be that followed the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement as led by Martin Luther King at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and also by such organizations, less committed to nonviolence but still seeking integration into the civic life of the United States, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The black nationalist approach would be adopted by various organizations, including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and the Black Panthers.
From the 1980s until the present year of 2015, advocates of black nationalism persisted in their views and activities; those favoring the integrationist approach, though, proved capable of absorbing the ideas of black pride, self-help, and group solidarity in advancing the cause of citizenship for African Americans in all dimensions: political, economic, and social.
But that approach will never come to fruition until we get K-12 education right.
A program of action on how to do that is offered in the many articles of this blog.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment