On Up From Slavery

Up From Slavery is the other pole of the era's great argument, and it should be read against Du Bois, not instead of him. Booker T. Washington's 1901 autobiography tells the story of his rise from slavery to the founding of Tuskegee Institute and to a position as the most powerful Black leader in America, and it lays out a philosophy of advancement that shaped a generation and provoked the most important strategic debate in Black American thought. Reading it requires holding admiration and disagreement in the same hand.

Washington's program was practical, patient, and economic. He urged Black Americans, only a generation out of slavery, to focus on acquiring useful skills, building businesses, accumulating property, and demonstrating their value through work, on the theory that economic strength and proven usefulness would, in time, earn respect and rights. Cast down your bucket where you are, he counseled, make yourself indispensable in the trades and on the land, and let dignity and political standing follow from economic foundation. In his famous Atlanta address, he seemed to accept, at least for the moment, social separation and political patience in exchange for white support of Black economic and educational progress.

There is real wisdom and real courage in the book. Washington built a major institution from almost nothing, in a violently hostile environment, and his emphasis on skill, work, and self-reliance spoke to the actual conditions of people who had been deliberately kept landless and unlettered. The autobiography is also, simply, a remarkable American success story, told with restraint and shrewdness by a man navigating mortal danger.

But the bargain had a cost that Du Bois named sharply, and that history largely vindicated. By accepting, even temporarily, the surrender of the vote and the acceptance of segregation, Washington's approach risked entrenching the very subordination it hoped eventually to escape. Without political power, Du Bois argued, economic gains could be stripped away at will, and without insistence on full rights, accommodation could harden into permanent second-class status. The decades that followed, of disenfranchisement and Jim Crow consolidation, gave that warning weight.

The reason both books belong in this library is that the argument between them is not settled, and it recurs. Whenever a marginalized group debates whether to seek change through patient institution-building and economic advancement or through direct demands for political rights and confrontation with injustice, it is having some version of the Washington-Du Bois argument. Reading Up From Slavery against The Souls of Black Folk, both on these shelves, is the way to understand a strategic question that outlived both men.

The full text is public domain and freely available. Read it as a powerful and limited document at once, the case for advancement through work, made by a formidable man, against which Du Bois made the case for advancement through rights. The republic's reform movements have been choosing between and combining those two paths ever since.