Du Bois, Dunning, and Washington?

To get to some understanding of what is likely true, one must read things that portend to be counter to one’s current notions. It is in that spirit I started reading W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk written in 1903. As my few but cherished readers will know, I think highly of Booker T. Washington, and I wanted to know more about what Du Bois thought and why. What I found surprised me and it had nothing to do with Mr. Washington.

I expected Mr. Du Bois to write things like this.

“…at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “damned Niggers.”

What I didn’t expect was other things that provide balance and context.

“He had emerged from slavery,–not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,–but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together.”

Or this referring to the Freedmen’s Bureau.

“On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land.”

What occurs to me here is that people accentuate what they agree with, and I am no exception. My understanding of Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X is different from many. However, if Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William A. Dunning wrote some of the same things, aren’t those things likely to be true? Of course, they are. Just don’t say them in polite company today.