Who do we consider to be the leaders of the first three generations of black leaders? Frederick Douglass, first generation black leader, abolitionist writer and orator, who was born a slave and escaped to freedom; Booker T Washington, educator, second generation black leader, who was born a slave, was freed when the Civil War ended; and WEB Du Bois, third generation black leader, civil rights activist, author and scholar, who was born free in Massachusetts after the Civil War, chose to attend college in the Deep South, and was co-founder of the NAACP.
This YouTube video: https://youtu.be/DAEg463i-Tc
Script for this video, with more Amazon book links: https://www.slideshare.net/BruceStrom1/woke-compassionate-bible-verses-blessed-are-the-poor-woe-to-the-rich-and-other-verses
All of the black leaders we discuss share one common characteristic: they were all hungry to learn, they were all hungry to learn how to read, and their literacy and oratory and accomplishments demonstrated to the world that indeed, black men, properly educated, could become leaders, achieve greatness, and inspire their associates, if they were only given half a chance. In the early days of the abolitionist and civil rights movement, blacks could not act alone, all three of these black leaders were assisted by fellow white liberals who were dedicated to these causes as well.
To understand their history, we must discuss the history of another black man in the generation prior to Frederick Douglass who was also hungry to learn, also hungry to learn how to read, who was also very intelligent, but who was more of a shaman than a black leader. This black man terrified white slave owners across the South, this black man led a slave rebellion where dozens of white men, women and children were murdered, his name was Nat Turner, his last name Turner was the name of his master. His life story is sketchy, our primary source is someone who interviewed him in his jail cell, Dr Wikipedia says many scholars find his account unreliable.
Why was Nat Turner a shaman? What is a shaman? Shamans were the intelligentsia of pre-literate tribal societies, shamans had visions from the gods telling them their destinies, shamans were often inspired by solar eclipses and unusual weather events, seeing them as messages from the gods. The medicine men were the shamans of some American Indians tribes.[1]
Alternately, you could argue that Nat Turner was a cult leader like the modern Charles Manson. Nat Turner read the Bible intently, especially the Old Testament stories of how Moses led his people out of slavery, out of the house of bondage, into the Promised Land, just as slaves yearned for a Promised Land where they could live as free men. Nat Turner had visions, Nat Turner found inspiration for the rebellion from solar eclipses and unusual weather events. Perhaps Nat Turner’s life suggests that sometimes a scanty education is far worse than no education at all.
Nat Turner was a spell-binding preacher, Dr Wikipedia says even some whites were impressed by his religiosity, Nat Turner had a small band of devoted followers, Nat Turner planned his rebellion. Nat Turner, in early 1831, with seventy other slaves and freed blacks, some on horseback, traveled from house to house, freeing the slaves, killing the whites they encountered, men, women, and children alike. This mayhem lasted for several days, until their small band was defeated by a hastily assembled state militia with artillery.
Nat Turner was hung, his body dissected, souvenir purses were made from his skin. Whites all over the South were terrified, hundreds of blacks in many communities were murdered out of fear. This retribution was not widespread, not out of compassion for the black victims, but because murdering slaves was recognized as a type of theft from their white masters.
What were the political consequences of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion?
- More state legislatures prohibited teaching slaves and freed blacks how to read, black schools in the South and the North were destroyed by mobs.
There was prejudice against blacks in both the South and the North, and there were free blacks in both the South and the North, but an overwhelming majority of the black slaves labored in the plantations and homesteads of the Deep South, which meant that prejudice was always more intense in the South. - Black religious meetings had to be supervised by a licensed white minister.
- Movements and public meetings of blacks were restricted further.
- Some black schools in the North and South were destroyed by mobs.
- Black slaves were more harshly demonized.
- Many abolitionist pictured Nat Turner as a hero for his race.
- Nat Turner strengthened the resolve of slave owners to defend slavery, black slaves suffered harsher treatment, even demonized.
- Nat Turner strengthened the prejudices of those who feared blacks.[2]
THE BIRTH OF ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT
What else happened in early 1831? The birth of the abolitionist movement is often credited to William Lloyd Garrison, he published the first issue of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. William Lloyd Garrison encouraged the runaway slave Frederick Douglass to become a orator and author in his abolition movement.
As in all movements, there were disagreements, some favored gradual emancipation, some favored immediate emancipation, some favored colonizing Africa with freed blacks from America. Lincoln initially favored gradual emancipation and colonization, but the polarizing circumstances of the Civil War brought about immediate emancipation during and after the war.[3]
The birth of the abolitionist movement provided a way for Frederick Douglass to realize his potential both as an abolitionist orator, capable of spell-binding speeches and as a best-selling author. He was born a slave in 1818, was quite a rebellious slave, who finally succeeded in escaping from slavery.
Booker T Washington was born a slave in 1856 and was freed as a teenager when the Civil War ended. He attended a black college after the war, and founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, raising money and support from leading white businessmen and philanthropists for black colleges.
WEB Du Bois was born free in Massachusetts in 1868, shortly after the Civil War, but chose to attend college in the Deep South. He was a sociology professor, studying and writing about the status of blacks, and was co-founder of the NAACP, becoming the first editor of the organization’s Crisis Magazine, gaining national recognition to the civil rights movement.
FIRST GENERATION OF BLACK LEADERS: FREDERICK DOUGLASS
As a young man, Frederick Douglass wrote a best-selling book of his life as a slave, emphasizing that chattel slaves on plantations were not quite seen as human, slaves were seen as simply talking livestock. The prosperous cotton-growing plantations were in the black belt in the heartland of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He was a slave in Maryland. Because the Upper South plantations were less prosperous, they often bred and sold young slaves to the Black Belt plantations, constantly breaking up slave families.
Frederick Douglass was separated from his mother as an infant, his mother’s owner lived a dozen miles away, he only saw her four or five times, and only at night. His mother was likely raped by a white slave owner, he did not know who his father was. He remembers how slaves were often savagely whipped and sexually abused as a way of life in the Deep South. White masters could do as they wished with their property. Slaves were given no beds, they slept side by side on the cold, damp floor, covered by miserable blankets.”
For six months Frederick Douglass had been handed over to a slave breaker Master Covey, who had no slaves of his own but broke individual slaves through constant harassment and cruelty. But Frederick Douglass instead broke the slave breaker.
Frederick Douglass was such a troublesome plantation slave that he was sent Mr Auld, a relative, living in Baltimore. City slaves had a better life, he was able to learn how to read, which opened up a greater world, he began to yearn for his freedom. He escaped slavery, his first autobiography ends with his life as a freedman in Massachusetts, and his early years as an abolitionist orator.
In his last autobiography, Frederick Douglass adds to his slave account, and continued with his life as an abolitionist orator and best-selling author. After the Civil War, his old master in Baltimore, Captain Auld, asked to meet with him. He revealed that after he read how Frederick’s grandmother, who raised him and many of the other slave children, was neglected, living in a cabin in the woods, he found a better place for her to stay.
Partially to avoid capture by slave traders, Frederick Douglass spent two years touring and speaking in England and Ireland. His friends raised funds During his journey his English friends raised funds to ransom him from slavery from his old master, Captain Auld. With his letters of manumission, Frederick Douglass had some protection from abduction by slave traders, and though his fame also provided protection, he was never completely safe from kidnapping.
Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass was also active in underground railroad assisting runaway slaves to gain their freedom, risking fines and imprisonment if he were caught. In 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass’ life would again change after he met John Brown as he planned his raid on Harper’s Ferry. Frederick Douglass refused him aid, saying it was a fool’s quest, but after the raid failed spectacularly, Frederick Douglass would once again be forced to flee to England for refuge and another speaking tour.
During the Civil War Frederick Douglass consulted with President Lincoln on racial issues many times. Frederick Douglass lobbied to permit black freedmen to join the army, and there were several black regiments after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and after that he lobbied for equal pay for black soldiers. After the war, he continued his efforts as a civil rights activist advocating for black freedmen.
SECOND GENERATION OF BLACK LEADERS: BOOKER T WASHINGTON
Like Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington was born a field slave, the family lived in a one-room cabin, everyone sleeping on the floor. He was born in a plantation in southwest Virginia, his family was not broken up, although he never knew who his father was, either. Unending toil, dawn to dusk, was their life, the life of a slave, until his family was emancipated at the end of the Civil War.
After the war, his mother moved to the coal country in West Virginia. Booker first worked in the mines, attending night school, eager to learn how to read. He escaped the mines to work as a household servant for the owner of the mine. After some years of studying hard, he showed up at Hampton University, seeking admission, working as a janitor to help pay his way.
Booker T Washington impressed his headmaster. When the Alabama legislature had appropriated two thousand dollars to start a new colored trade school in Tuskegee, his former headmaster General Armstrong was asked if he could recommend any qualified white men who could organize and take charge of this school. General Armstrong replied that he did not know of any qualified white men, but that he knew a highly qualified educated black man and recent graduate, Booker T Washington.
When Booker T Washington traveled to Tuskegee, he discovered that there were no buildings for the school, and the appropriation only covered teacher salaries. The first classes were held in a renovated repurposed stable and henhouse. Booker T Washington introduced himself to both black and white town leaders, seeking assistance in building the new school. Over the years the school expanded, with students learning how to construct the school buildings, gaining valuable trade experience.
The financial needs of this growing college soon outstripped the capacity of the local community to finance the expansion. He asked for assistance, and General Armstrong helped him hold his first fund raising lecture tour and fund-raising trip up North. When Tuskegee really started expanding, he would spend six months out of the year crisscrossing Northern cities, giving lectures and visiting philanthropists and leading white businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, becoming the spokesman for the black community nationally.
Booker T Washington is famous for his speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, which he also helped to organize and promote during his many fund-raising trips through the North. This was the very first time a black man addressed such a large and influential body of white businessmen, white national politicians, and reporters from all the major newspapers in the country. In his speech known as the Atlanta Compromise, he rhetorically addressed both the black workers and white businessmen, but his real audience was the white businessmen. He wanted to reassure them that the black workers were hard working and not too eager to rock the boat with talk about civil rights and such, he also hoped they would contribute to the black colleges and schools.
We also told the fascinating story of Augustine Tolton. Although Augustine was born an illiterate slave, after the Civil War he overcame daunting obstacles to attend seminary in Rome and be ordained as the first black Catholic priest in America, becoming literate in four languages, English, German, Latin, and Koenine Greek, shepherding a parish first in his adopted city, Quincy, Illinois, then in Chicago. Father Augustine Tolton labored in relative obscurity, never achieving national fame as a civil rights activist, he instead preferred to quietly minister to the spiritual needs of his parishioners, mostly black, some white. Father Tolton faced discrimination as a priest, his parish was never well funded, and as his health was poor, he passed away during a heat wave when visiting parishioners in Chicago.
The Catholic slaves in Kentucky had more dignity, their marriages were recognized by the church and their births were recorded in the parish registry. However, they were still slaves, and his biography records how some families were broken up when the master’s estate was settled, though parents and their children were kept together. His mother and her children escaped from slavery during the Civil War, though their boat came under fire by slave catchers.
What is most remarkable about the biography of Father Augustine Tolton, “From Slave to Priest,” is how many Catholic clergy, including priests, nuns, and bishops, both American and Roman, both in those years after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, were eager to help this barely literate former black slave gain a clerical education and encourage and enable him to study for the priesthood. He is being considered for sainthood.
WEB Du Bois was a third-generation black leader and activist, born after the Civil War, who demanded dignity, civil rights, and real economic opportunity for blacks. He was born soon after the Civil War in Massachusetts, he was one of the few blacks in his neighborhood and in his school. He decided to attend Fisk University in Tennessee to experience what it was like to be black in the Deep South.
After spending three years at Fisk, WEB Du Bois was selected for a scholarship to attend Harvard, as they were seeking to expand their student body with bright students with meager means. The colleges taught the classics in that era, he could read and was conversant in Greek, Latin, and German. After earning his degree, he then applied for a scholarship at a top German University and was accepted. But he decided to pursue his PhD at Harvard, as the German University required further schooling for this.
After he graduated, he landed a teaching position at Wilberforce University, but after a few years, he accepted a teaching position at Atlanta University. His research into sociology and the status of blacks in American led to his submitting articles to national magazines, gaining him growing national prominence.
WEB Du Bois also remembers, “Lynchings were a continuing horror at the start of my teaching career. Lynchings climaxed in 1892, when 235 persons were publicly murdered.”
One of his first books, Souls of Black Folks, was a collection of essays originally printed in magazines such as The Atlantic, and many were incorporated into his autobiography. This included a touching essay on his summer teaching job in rural Tennessee, the schoolhouse was a log hut, the students sat in rough plank benches, the desk was three boards hastily nailed together, and he had to return his chair to the landlady each night.
Also included were essays on black education and how his first son passed away because the segregated Atlanta hospital refused to admit black patients.
Souls of Black Folk also included essays on sharecropping, on how the Southern plantations had decayed in the decades after the war, and on an older black Episcopalian priest he had met, Alexander Crummell.
Alexander Crummell was born in 1819 in the same generation as Frederick Douglass, and like Father Tolton, faced discrimination. He struggled in parishes in Rhode Island and New York City, and was active in the abolitionist movement, where he met WEB Du Bois. Crummel decided to serve as a missionary to Liberia, which he promoted as a destination for American blacks. Although he influenced Liberian intellectual and religious life, twenty years later he returned to America when he felt his life was in danger due to an insurgency. He was called to pastor a parish in Washington, DC, and he then founded the first independent black Episcopal church in the city, St Luke’s Episcopal Church.
As WEB Du Bois, our contrarian activist leader, rose in prominence in the black civil rights movement, he came into conflict with the accommodationist Booker T Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute. While WEB Dubois encouraged blacks to insist on their civil rights, dignity, and equal opportunity; Booker T Washington encouraged blacks to get an education so they would have marketable skills, to be submissive and hardworking and to save their pennies.
Booker T Washington was expanding Tuskegee Institute and promoting black education in the darkest days of Jim Crow when lynchings were rampant and went unpunished. Most jobs open to blacks were in agriculture and the trades, so black colleges were, in essence, trade schools. Blacks could rarely pay their tuition, so black schools were heavily dependent on philanthropy.
Booker T Washington was always persistent and patient in his fund-raising. Usually, the really large donations came from businessmen he had been calling on for many years. The businessman who donated five dollars this year might donate five thousand a few years from now, and fifty thousand in his will. To raise funds, Booker T Washington knew he had to dwell on the positive, praising the many whites who supported black education, but not dwelling on the negative, including the many lynchings and humiliations and discriminations that dogged him and every black man of his era, so he could make a good impression of the moneyed white Northern philanthropists and businessmen.
WEB Du Bois argued correctly that Booker T Washington was hostage to his benefactors, fearful if he insisted too forcefully on civil rights and dignity for blacks that his funding sources would dry up. We do know that after his death his personal papers revealed that Booker did promote civil rights anonymously, often hiring legal counsel for those fighting Jim Crow, lobbying out of the public eye, and some say he even contributed to the NAACP.
But as De Bois pointed out, this bargain between the white employers and the black workers was frustrated, “between 1895 and 1909 the whole South disenfranchised its Negro voters by unfair and illegal restrictions and passed a series of Jim Crow laws which demoted the Negro citizen to a subordinate caste.” WEB Du Bois rebelled against this subservient attitude, he crusaded more vigorously for civil rights for blacks.
WEB Du Bois became a co-founder of the NAACP, a new organization founded in 1909 by a group of white liberals and black leaders, becoming the editor of the movement’s magazine, The Crisis. His editorials and his continued contributions to other national magazines greatly elevated the visibility of the NAACP, and near the end of Booker T Washington’s life, the NAACP became the leading black civil rights organization.
Another co-founder of the NAACP was Ida B Wells, a brave journalist who dedicated her life to publicize the all-too-common lynchings of blacks. The NAACP magazine, the Crisis included a monthly tally of lynchings so it would be continually in the public eye.
The old Tuskegee Machine was primarily focused on funding black colleges. After the death of Booker T Washington, this role was assumed by the colleges themselves. In contrast, the NAACP focused on litigating civil rights issues to slowly roll-back discriminatory laws. 1915 was a banner year for Supreme court victories advancing civil rights.
But 1915 was also a landmark in the history of cinema, the first full-length movie was a marvel of technological innovation, The Birth of a Nation, which unfortunately was a disaster for civil rights. This movie depicted the KKK night riders as modern-day knights, rescuing southern damsels in distress from darkies with bulging eyes, leading to the second incarnation of the KKK and a dramatic increase in lynchings of blacks. But when the NAACP agitated to have the movie banned wherever possible, these publicized campaigns greatly increased the national profile of the NAACP.
Publicizing lynchings did have some effect, but blacks lost influence in the Republican Party as it became the party of big business. Fight for civil rights was like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. There was little progress until the Presidency of FDR when, with help from his wife Eleanor, civil rights started gaining traction.
One highly publicized event that gave blacks hope that one day civil rights would be granted blacks was the Marion Anderson concert. Marion Anderson was a famous contralto opera singer who toured Europe, but she was refused use of the DAR auditorium in Washington, DC because she was black. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and publicized the injustice in her newspaper column and arranged for her to stage a free public concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which was broadcast over the radio to a national audience.
Although civil rights were not a major focus of the FDR administration, due to the Southern congressmen dominating Congress, there were major improvements made that helped blacks economically, with a real promise of future civil rights gains. These small improvements convinced many blacks to switch their allegiance to the Democratic Party.
There were real civil rights gains under President Harry Truman, when he issued an Executive Order desegregating the Armed Forces. In 1947 Harry Truman was the first President to address a national NAACP Convention, speaking to an audience of ten thousand from the Lincoln Memorial. Eleanor Roosevelt had preceded him to the podium.
During the years of the Depression, the NAACP budget was strained, as was the relationship between the contrarian WEB Du Bois and the new NAACP President, Walter White. WEB Du Bois had some research projects he wanted to devote more time to, so he accepted a position as the head of the sociology department once again at Atlanta University, though he continued to contribute many articles to the Crisis Magazine.
The main research project he had in mind was his groundbreaking history, Black Reconstruction, 1860 through 1880, reviewing the years of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the beginning of the Jim Crow Redemption Era, through the eyes of its black citizens. Although the South lost the Civil War, they won the peace, they won the cultural wars of the Lost Cause and white supremacy. To counter this, WEB Dubois describes in Black Reconstruction both how the black soldiers were instrumental in winning the Civil War for the Union, and the many contributions by blacks during Reconstruction, when democracy flowered in the Deep South.
When it was first published, Black Reconstruction earned excellent reviews from the New York Times, but it was rejected and ridiculed by the segregationist Southern historians of the Dunning School. The thought that a black man could write a scholarly work was seen as ludicrous by Southern historians, and this book was ignored by many until the 1960’s Civil Rights movement.
The Dunning School was influenced by the segregationist culture of the Jim Crow Redemption Era. Likewise, during the Depression historians like Charles Beard saw history solely through the lens of economics, downplaying social issues like civil rights.
The horrors of the Nazi regime and their concentration camps and death camps also influenced many to support civil rights, as did the patient efforts of journalists and magazines like WEB Du Bois and the Crisis magazine to publicize civil rights issues such as lynchings and peonage.
One common theme in our videos on WEB Du Bois is that he was a contrarian. To be effective, Civil Rights activists have to be contrarians. But this strength can also be a weakness.
Was WEB Du Bois a communist? The answer is YES: When he turned 93, he joined and paid his dues to the CPUSA, Communist Party of the United States. We would like to emphasize that neither WEB Du Bois, nor anyone from the NAACP, ever even hinted that the government should be overthrown by a violent Bolshevik uprising.
If we but reflect on the life experiences of WEB Du Bois, we can understand the appeal of communism, or at least the theoretical communism of Karl Marx, not the terrors of Soviet or Chinese Communism. In his day, during the Jim Crow era, the government denied due process and equality to blacks, they were forced to work for starvation wages, and if blacks called the police, often they were the ones arrested! Tens of thousands of blacks were lynched during the Jim Crow years, and often the police condoned or even participated in the lynchings. Progress on improving civil rights was just glacial before the civil rights era of the 1960’s.
We also explore the strained relations between the NAACP and the Communist Party, WEB Du Bois’ visits to communist Russia and China, his second marriage to a committed communist, his participation in the Pan African movement, and his final years spent in exile in Ghana.
We plan reflections on another collection of essays from Booker T Washington, plus we plan to reflect on the well-known autobiography of Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a collection of James Baldwin’s essays, plus a comparison between Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that wonderful little best-selling book by Harriet Beecher Stowe that Lincoln told her sparked the Civil War, and the happy slave Southern competing narrative, Aunt Phillip’s Cabin, which sold far fewer copies.
We reflected on one of the essays in the 1619 Project, which simply tells us what it was like to like as an ordinary black person in the Jim Crow Deep South. We plan to do videos on several more essays from this collection.
DISCUSSION OF SOURCES:
We highly recommend the autobiographies of all our three leading black leaders. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Booker T Washington are relatively complete, and the autobiography of WEB Dubois is useful for his youth and school days, but to accurately reflect on his history with the NAACP and his civil rights activism, and his later life story, the biography by David Levering Lewis is essential.
Father Augustine Tolton’s biography was written by an admiring Catholic nun, she must have used caches of letters as a primary source.
Many of the essays in WEB Du Bois’ Soul of Black Folk are autobiographical.
WEB Du Bois’ history of Black Reconstruction is very readable, with high-flying rhetorical flourishes that mostly work, and is likely the most influential of these books.
There are several interesting YouTube videos where David Levering Lewis delivers a presentation on black history. In this video, “Lewis talks about divisions in the African-American community and compares them to the split between Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aAlrLViif8
Lewis has written numerous books, we have picked up former library copies of his biography of Martin Luther King and his history of the Dreyfus Affair, the anti-Semitic event that rocked the interwar French politics that we have discussed in our video on Vichy France.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_man
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner’s_slave_rebellion
4 Trackbacks / Pingbacks