Booker T. Washington Quotes
The President invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House:
The President invited Booker T. Washington, a Black, to dine at the White House. It was described as:
In 1901 newly elected President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. It was the first time a Black had ever been so invited. There was a public uproar in the South. Shortly thereafter, the President and Washington were both in the audience of a Yale University event. A Supreme Court Justice took the podium. The statement brought thunders of applause.
In the early 20th century, Carver and Du Bois were the two most important Negro leaders in America. However, they disagreed over tactics. Carver tended to believe that if the Negro would be educated and trained for meaningful occupations, he would rise in the eyes of the whites and discrimination would diminish. Du Bois was more cynical as can be seen in this quotation as he looked back on history when he was 95 and close to death. He had the advantage at this time of seeing that Washington’s strategy had failed, but he opposed Washington on this from the beginning. Most whites preferred Washington’s view as whites were relived of immediate moral responsibility for racism and the burden was placed on Blacks to train, develop and display themselves as worthy. It was only when very large numbers of Blacks had done this and nothing much changed in terms of civil and economic rights, that it was clear that Washington’ view had been hopelessly naïve.
He was criticizing the other major Black leader of the time, Booker T. Washington. See {625803} for the kind of position that angered Du Bois.
Booker T. Washington was a Black leader who did much for his people, but his objectives were quite limited. He was “the white’s favorite Black man.” Du Bois not only took on the White establishment but the Black establishment as well.
He was one of the Black intellectuals who criticized the white’s favorite Negro Leader, Booker T. Washington who concentrated his efforts on Black education and self-improvement to make Blacks more acceptable to whites. Trotter was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of President Woodrow Wilson’s policy that for the first time instituted official segregation of Federal Employment and his firing of all Blacks then in executive or white collar positions in the Federal Government. Wilson, for all his supposed modernity, was one of the most racist of all American Presidents. Washington thought that segregation was so entrenched that it would take many generations to eliminate it, and therefore felt that the best thing to do was to improve the positions of Blacks within the segregationist structure. Both sides were right from different perspectives although Trotter, Dubois and their followers did much more to confront and eventually change racist America.
