‘the right sort of college-bred black men’: W.E.B Du Bois to Theodore Roosevelt (May 22, 1905)

May 22, 1905

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt

Sir:

I learn that you are expecting to visit Atlanta this fall and I want to ask you to visit Atlanta University. This is asking a good deal, but I am not making the request lightly. Atlanta University has stood for nearly forty years as an institution peculiarly devoted to the high aspirations of the American Negro. We have suffered for this—we are suffering for it but we are sticking to our ideals. At the same time we think we deserve something of the American people and therefore of you as their Chief representative. We were glad to have President McKinley-come to Atlanta even though he did not visit us, and we were glad when he visited a sister institution where many of our graduates teach. Yet when we face the prospect of your doing the same we feel differently.

You are yourself a college man and have enunciated the highest ideals fearlessly. This institution is the child of Harvard and Yale. It has sent into the world 500 black men and women who mean something. You are coming to our very threshold—will you not step in a moment and tell us and the world you have the same faith in the right sort of college-bred black men that you have in the right sort of artisans and working men?

I sincerely hope you can. A.U. Is right in the city—a mile from the post office so that a call will take by a little time. I beg to remain, Sir,

W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington, May 25, 1905

It is no small institutional feat to have a member of the highest office in the the land—the Office of the President of the United States of America—and no less, the President himself, to come speak on an institution’s campus grounds. Unlike most requests that proceed from the institution’s President, W.E.B. Du Bois, the most well known African American scholar, having become the first African American Ph.D. recipient from Harvard University ten years earlier, inquires directly to the nation’s 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt, as to whether he would come to then Atlanta University to the address the campus. However, more than an address to a campus, Du Bois surreptitiously seeks an endorsement for his own program of education for African Americans from the highest office in the land while explicitly distinguishing between his work at Atlanta University from the work of his ideological rival Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute.

Clandestinely invoking the 25th President of the United States, President William McKinley, and his 1898 visit to the campus of Washington’s Tuskegee, which signalled his endorsement of the program there, Du Bois unapologetically made clear the differences between the then Atlanta University and the then Tuskegee Institute in a manner that would cause unintended readers of this over a-century-old correspondence to blush: “We were glad to have President McKinley-come to Atlanta even though he did not visit us, and we were glad when he visited a sister institution where many of our graduates teach…will you not step in a moment and tell us and the world you have the same faith in the right sort of college-bred black men that you have in the right sort of artisans and working men?”

And while President Roosevelt did not speak at Atlanta University—he did in fact speak in Atlanta at Georgia Tech in 1905—the secretary to the President afforded Du Bois the magnanimity of the following reply: “Your wishes will be bourne in mind and given consideration when the details of the trip are taken up.” All the same, what Du Bois made clear to the highest office in the land was that there were different ways to train “college-bred” black men and women, and his work at Atlanta University deserved attention.

While other commentaries address plainly Du Bois’s conceptual framing of the ‘Talented Tenth’ and his partial disavowal of the abuse it caused among college-trained black men and women who viewed the kind of training he advocated as a honorific as opposed to a vocational call to service, one thing is clear: In this letter, Du Bois believed that his emphasis upon a kind of 20th century vocational liberal arts and intellectual training deserved a hearing, and upon a platform equivalent to Atlanta’s ‘sister institution’ the then Tuskegee Institute.