“Dear Mr Washington: I have been for some time seeking a leisure hour in which to answer your kind letter of the 17th January [1896]—but leisure hours are scarce here. I feel I should like the work at Tuskegee if I could be of service to you…At present I do not know just how I could be of service. I teach most primary and secondary branches-preferring of course, History, Economics, Social Problems, &c….In any case I am willing and eager to entertain any proposition for giving my services to your school.”-William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, “Wednesday, April 1, 1896, (Wilberforce, Ohio)”
“My dear Mr. Washington: Yours of 4-1 just received, and after a careful consideration of its contents, I now venture a reply. It is certainly very kind of you to take the interest you have in me…So if you are prepared to make me an offer now it shall receive my first consideration.”-George Washington Carver, “April 12, 1896, (Ames, Iowa)”
In the spring of 1896, Booker T. Washington was in the midst of recruiting not one but two luminaries to Tuskegee Institute: W.E.B. Du Bois and George Washington Carver. (Here one has to pause and imagine what might have been had Washington secured at Tuskegee the services of two of the most distinguished scholars—preeminent even—in their respective fields in all of American and African American educational and intellectual history.)
Arguably, a Copernican Revolution in higher education indeed would have been had at Tuskegee to have had the most successful university president, agricultural scientist and social scientist of the late 19th and early 20th century—each of these designations are still far too limiting considering their widespread accomplishments—serving contemporaneously in Tuskegee, Alabama. Despite his eventual deep-seated disagreements with Du Bois—and even his many disagreements with Carver, which are recorded in their many letters to one another, note the following: Booker T. Washington was not threatened or intimidated to recruit talent that would rival his own.
All the same, the aforementioned letters from Du Bois and Washington—Du Bois writing from Wilberforce while still serving as an instructor there and Carver writing from Iowa Agriculture College where he would be soon finishing his master’s degree in scientific agriculture—demonstrated their profound admiration and respect for Washington also.
Carver would choose to go to Tuskegee having already been in negotiations with several institutions including Alcorn A &M located in Mississippi. And Du Bois sent several communications to Washington to discuss the prospect of joining him at Tuskegee eventually teaching, presumably, during the summer of 1903. While one might well imagine what this trifecta could have been, it is safe to suggest that each made indelible marks on their respective institutions (Tuskegee and Atlanta Universities) that reverberated throughout the world.
