A bit of a post-script:

I listened to some of your friend and mine, Michael Savage, on the radio trotting out a piece of writing from Booker T Washington — asking us all to move on and attacking those negroes who continue on with their grievances, and the race hustlers who make a career out of negro anger.  (To paraphrase, contemporanious terms used regarding Booker T Washington.)

I sort of view these shots from Booker T Washington as being attacks on WEB Du Bois, but that is as much an over simplification and a personification of various strains of argument we have had for all of our nation’s history.  The problem with Washington’s line of thought, of course, is that at this time attitudes toward blacks from the white populace was actually moving backward, which makes Washington’s demand to acknowledge improvements for black Americans a little queasy.

In this context, WEB Du Bois radicalized, his anger sharpening, and he lost much goodwill he previously had toward Booker T Washington.  Just around the corner, Marcus Garvey would walk into the picture, founding the organization now lead by Louis Farrahkhan, and challenge Du Bois from a completely different perspective.  Surely there are antecedents to Garvey’s Black Nationalism (even within the popular nineteenth century idea that the solution to the “Peculiar Institution” was to ship all the slaves back to Africa), but this is roughly the spiritual grandfather of your Jeremiah Wright.

So the voice of Michael Savage cried out that this was 40 years after the Civil War, and still nothing has changed a century later.  He ends the monolouge by suggesting that Booker T Washington is a man not known in the black community, which is a lie — and how many elementary schools in predominantly and historically black areas are named after Washington? — or at least an untruth.  He is widely dismissed as something of an “Uncle Tom”, and that tends to be how he is slotted in our Universities.  I respect that train of thought, though quite confidentally have a high regard for the man, limitations allowed — inbedded in cringing as the most right wing of prominent right wing talk show hosts find him desirable as an example.  He will pop up in Black politicians’ lists of historical heroes, which can be viewed as either a cynical message that they are the “Right Type of African American” and won’t suddenly demand reparations, but then I give your Condelleza Rices more credit — a conservative black will find a great deal to recommend out of a conservative black leader, and pull yourself up by the boot-straps even as everyone is pushing your face down toward your boot-straps.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under History Regurgitates Forward. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.