“ Just here arises the need of the trained and scholarly men of a race to employ their knowledge and culture and teaching and to guide both the opinions and habits of the crude masses […] we can spread abroad and widely disseminate that culture and enlightenment which shall permeate and leaven the entire social and domestic life of our people and so give that civilization.”- Alexander Crummell, “Civilization, The Primal Need of the Race” (1897)

One important organization and person in Du Bois’s life that he largely omitted when documenting the story of his intellectual life was that of the American Negro Academy and Alexander Crummell.

Du Bois secured his first academic appointment at Wilberforce University, a religious institution under the auspices of the A.M.E. church. While there, Du Bois would try to maintain a careful, uneasy balance between the religious expectations that the university would require of him and the research, educational, and intellectual expectations that he would require of the university. And it was at Wilberforce University where Du Bois first met Alexander Crummell, a Yale-educated African American preacher and scholar (before the Civil War).

Crummell’s willingness to take his fellow African American clergymen to task for their derisory education, illiteracy, immorality, and a host of other areas proved attractive to Du Bois’s bourgeoning agnosticism. And though Du Bois, and other African American Academy members attempted to craft quasi-religious reform rhetoric to implement the reform aims that Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” promoted, it was clear that the question of how to infuse scholarly knowledge into quasi-religious reform rhetoric was never entirely resolved, as this oil-and-water union between Du Bois’s credentials and agnosticism, and the religious dogma associated with Crummell’s rigid adherence to Episcopalian doctrine, would result in Du Bois’s relative silence about this period in his life.

Although no satisfactory explanation has been offered thus far for Du Bois’s failure to describe his time within the American Negro Academy and his relationship with Alexander Crummell, perhaps Du Bois’s silence about this period might be explained in terms of this experience’s frightening similarity with the zeal he exhibited at both Fisk and Harvard (albeit brief). This period probably reminded Du Bois of how closely and organically linked he had become with a fundamentalist para-African American religious organization and preacher, which, in the end, was radically at odds with his lasting agnostic legacy.

“The first book I knew was the Bible, and it is the book from which I have received the greatest amount of instruction and information. The part of the Bible which interested me perhaps more than any other was that which told the story of the way in which Moses led the people out of the House of Bondage.

For many years the Bible was the only book the colored people knew. Even in slavery, when very few could read or write, the older people managed some how or other to gain a pretty good acquaintance with the Bible, and the younger generation have not yet forgotten what they learned on their mother’s knees.”-Booker T. Washington to J.S. Dickerson, managing editor of The Standard, November 10, 1911

To understand Booker T. Washington’s life and vocation one would do well to understand the Bible. Similarly, when discerning the lived lives of men and women—and the opinions many arrive at concerning them—one would do well to understand the Bible. And here Booker T. Washington’s ‘Statement on the Bible’ published in The Standard discloses the central tenet of his vocational life: “…it is the book from which I have received the greatest amount of instruction and information.”

As his letters, writings, speeches and biographies—Up From Slavery, The Story of My Life and Work and My Larger Education—intimate, Mr. Washington’s vocational life was rooted in a profound regard for biblical principles that for him was not a mere late 19th century and early 20th century notion that would be forgotten, forsaken or considered fanatical and fundamentalist. For he believed that through observing the Bible he would provide sufficient historical record concerning it with his life hence his adage: “Let examples answer.”

For at times his profound sense of calling—prophetic in formation and demonstration, including both his flaws and foibles until the time of his passing in 1915—found itself at odds at times with members of his own race and against the system of American racism which had enslaved him. All of which is quite telling when one considers his explicit reference to the biblical telling of the personage of Moses. And one need not be a seminarian or theologian to consider what Washington was doing here with this statement referencing Moses leading the people out of the ‘House of Bondage’.

For the life of Mr. Washington and the life of the personage of Moses contains many striking parallels that would not have escaped his shrewd perception. One of which was the extreme humility and meekness of Moses in cultivating internal reformation in concert with external deliverance. For some, Moses is only read as a deliverer through the miraculous but Booker T. Washington added that this deliverance was premised upon the continuous reformation of a people that was inextricably woven into not only deliverance but an ongoing union with the Creator.

“Cambridge, Mass.,

April 24, 1905.

My Dear Du Bois…Of course in the heat of discussion I hear of you everywhere. I am rather troubled to find that a great many people suppose that you head a kind of opposition to Booker T. Washington’s ideas; so far as I understand, there is no innate lack of harmony between your purpose in life and his. You take a certain thing which must be done, viz. the higher education of those who can profit by it; he takes another end of the same problem; naturally each of you thinks that his interest is the more important; if you did not, you would exchange activities. But I do not see how either excludes the other. Our bumptious friend has made a great deal of u necessary trouble by his assaults on Mr. Washington, in season and out of season, and I have actually found people who seemed to suppose that you and Trotter were working together.

Sincerely yours,

Albert Bushnell Hart”

Many commentators—including the present one—have tried to look retrospectively to help reconcile the ideas of one Booker T. Washington and one William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. And perhaps Harvard historian, Albert Bushnell Hart, one of Du Bois’s former teachers has already done so in this April 24, 1905 letter to Du Bois in the midst of the heightening tensions between the work of Du Bois and the work of Washington. In this letter to Du Bois, he seeks to gently advise Du Bois concerning his affiliation with William Monroe Trotter and any perceived involvement with this strong-voiced anti-Washington contingent and leader of the “The Boston Riot,” occuring two years earlier with agitators targeting none other than Booker T. Washington.

(In a July 30, 1903 gathering in Boston, Massachusetts at the Zion A.M.E. Church, very strong opposition assembled in the audience to question Booker T. Washington and disrupt his speech that notwithstanding he was able to give. The “riot” included spraying the dias with cayenne pepper, displaying loud “hissing’ towards Washington and provided audience members a list of antagonistic questions to Washington. The full account including Trotter’s arrest and explanation appears in the Boston Globe’s, July 31, 1903, “An Account of the Boston Riot.” To be fantastically clear, it actually should not have actually been termed a riot and Mr. Du Bois was not in attendance.

All the same, in addition to his concern that Du Bois was being associated with Trotter, he plainly describes the key differences between he and Washington that Du Bois and all future observers can hardly deny: “You [Du Bois] take a certain thing which must be done, viz. the higher education of those who can profit by it; he [Washington] takes another end of the same problem.”

Whether in the early 20th century or now in the first quarter of the 21st century, one can hardly disagree with the sentiment that the vocational callings of some men and women require advanced higher education and other callings—no less valuable and perhaps in the long run far more profitable—requires specialized training (outside of higher education) for entrepreneurial and economic success.

Mr. Hart’s intervention perhaps came far too late for his former student. It had been 10 years since Washington’s famous Atlanta Exposition Address and 4 years since his (1901) _Up From Slavery_ had solidified his standing in the nation as the undisputed leader of the African American community while serving as the founding principal of the Tuskegee Institute. And with Du Bois’s publication 2 years later, (1903) _The Souls of Black Folk_ (which also included a rather vociferous treatment of Washington in a chapter titled, “Of Booker T. Washington and others”) Du Bois had also become a national leader in scope and in voice. In fact, Du Bois replied directly and sharply to Hart’s correspondence : “I have no personal opposition to him—I honor much of his work. But his platform has done the race infinite harm & I’m working against it with all my might…”.

To the expressed delight of some and to the deep chagrin of others, this tension led persons and supporters of both men then—like Professor Hart—and still now to make their very best attempts for history to record the ideologies of both Du Bois’s and Washington as ‘not one or the other but both.’

“I am the personage of Uncle Tom and I feel proud of the title.”-Rev. Josiah Henson, An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (1879)

In a reply written to Lord Carlisle of England in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe outlines those effects she had hoped Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in the same year, might have on the American public. She wrote, “1^st. To soften and moderate the bitterness of feeling in extreme abolitionists. 2^nd. To convert to the abolitionist view, many of whom this same bitterness had repelled. 3^rd. To inspire the free colored people with self-respect, hope and confidence. And 4^th. To inspire universally through the country, a kindlier feeling toward the Negro race.”

Uncle Tom, an African American enslaved person, who in the novel’s opening scene is leading prayer among fellow enslaved men and women. He quickly learns that he is to be sold to help pay off his master’s debts. Instead of fleeing (as he was advised to do by friends and family) Uncle Tom resigns himself to the condition he faces, which was ultimately death. Relying upon his Christian faith and fortitude, the novel depicts Uncle Tom’s heroic endurance of enslavement with the hopes of putting to shame the Christianity of southern slave-owning families. Stowe’s antislavery novel was designed to prick the consciences of both northern and southern readers about the horrors of slavery.

The novel was first published as a serial appearing in the National Era between 1851 and 1852. The story was published in 40 installments and Stowe was paid $300. When the story was published as a two volume novel in March 1852, 300,000 copies were sold in the first year and nearly 2 million copies were sold world wide by 1857. In 1849, three years prior to Stowe’s publication, the Rev. Josiah Henson, a former slave, published his life story which became the partial basis for the most infamous characterization in literary history and, arguably, American cultural history. (Sadly, Henson’s own heroic feats were not used in Stowe’s novel which included successfully escaping from enslavement with his entire family and starting anew in Canada. This he also owed to his Christian faith.) All the same, in his third autobiography written in 1879, Henson boldly announces that “I am the personage of Uncle Tom and I feel proud of the title.”

Despite the novel’s success—including the approbation of Rev. Henson whose life Stowe based the character upon—the extent to which Stowe’s novel successfully achieved her aims was and remains controversial. Particularly, the sentimentalist devices Stowe employed in the work trying to attain these objectives. Chiefly, the depiction of Uncle Tom is the subject that has garnered the most critical (and cantankerous) attention about the novel over the past 175 years especially within the African American intellectual and broader community.

Moreover, in 1853, Stowe published an apologetic to defend her fictional account, titled The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded. In it, she relays that the depiction of Uncle Tom is largely taken from Henson’s first autobiography published in 1849. Stowe visited twice with Henson, once at her home in Andover in 1849 and a second time in 1850 at her brother’s house in Boston. Despite Stowe’s apologetic and Reverend Henson’s approbation and reclamation of the figure, polarizing African American intellectual views on Uncle Tom persisted even a full century later with James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois possessing opposite views.

James Baldwin who would publish his most famous novel Go Tell It On The Mountain exactly 100 years later in 1952–with a very different figuring of African American Christianity embodied in the Black Masculine Christian Engagement of Gabriel Grimes (see my forthcoming commentary)—severely denounced the novel in his 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” He labeled Stowe’s and Henson’s Tom so thoroughly unrealistic by suggesting that African Americans must become implausibly pious in order for American whites to recognize their humanity. W.E.B. Du Bois, on the other hand, suggested in an October 27, 1945 article appearing in the Chicago Defender that Stowe’s work was understandable and necessary given the time period. (Du Bois wrote several years earlier in a 1911 article appearing in Crisis Magazine also wrote: “Accordingly, in her writings we find the artist dominated by the preacher and reformer. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to her a sermon hurled against a great moral evil.”)

All the same, contemporary usage has gone well beyond this history of the figure of Uncle Tom and has degenerated into monikers, labels and pejoratives that have surely gone well beyond what Stowe, Henson, Baldwin and Du Bois would have ever intended.

TITLES

“I do not say you should not use them, should not possess them, should not crave them, but do not make the mistake of feeling that titles are going to help you, unless you have got strength aside from the title. No amount of titles will put brains into a person’s head if the brains are not there before.” – Booker T. Washington, “A Sunday Evening Talk,” January 10, 1909

Hear this again and again: Positional and titular authority is the lowest form of authority. If a man or woman cannot nor does not command the respect of his supervisors, peers, colleagues and subordinates independent of a position or title, this man or woman is no greater than the man or woman who has no such position and title. Positions change, and the only permanence one can possess is that found in one’s own person in back of the position.

This is why the founding principal and president of Tuskegee University constantly impressed upon his students the need to constantly improve their own persons. Note the following: It is but half the task to secure the title or position. The most significant half is what one does with the title or position. (One must not only plan how to get the position or title, but what to do with the position and title when one gets it.) And the attention paid to one’s own person helps towards this end. Aside from acquiring credentials and competence, the comprehensive development of one’s character is a third facet that can never be taken from the person in back of a position. (Character is not your highest moment or your lowest moment. Character is your most consistent moment.)

More importantly, Character, like documentable Credentials and demonstrative Competence, is easily transferable from position to position, unit to unit or organization-to-organization. This also explains why the singular, solitary focus upon a position and title (as opposed to the development of one’s own person) is unwise. For the man or woman who has “strength aside from the title” and who has “brains” in their “heads” will always possess these attributes without regards to a position or a title. (And they will always be desired and in demand.) And the founding principal and president of Tuskegee University who we celebrated in the centennial year since his passing (1915-2015) was not only such a man, but he also offered these wise “words” and set forth the accompanying “works” in his 34-year long presidency at the helm of Tuskegee (Institute) University (1881-1915).