Booker T. Washington spoke about men like Cummings.
There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Booker T. Washington
Lol!
Booker T. Washington was a fool.
The Tragedy And Betrayal Of Booker T. Washington
I’ve been (slowly) making my way through this
Booker T. Washington biography. It really is a great read. But that aside, I think that it also highlights a great tragedy in race relations in this country. Washington is arguably the most effective and powerful black conservative in this country's history. (I maintain that Malcolm X was, for much of his public life, a black conservative.) Unlike today, Washington lived in a time when there actually was a credible black conservative tradition. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” is remembered as a betrayal and a sell-out because it accepted segregation, and argued against black political agitation. But in fact, at the time, the response from black America to the “Compromise” was at worst mixed, and at best quite positive. No less than W.E.B. Du Bois called the speech, “the basis for a real settlement between whites and black in the South.”
It makes sense, when you think about it. Washington basically said to the white South in 1895,“You win. We don’t want the right to vote. We just want to till our farms, better ourselves, and be left alone. Leave us in peace, and you’ll hear no more of this voting or integration business.” You have to remember the state of mind of black people, at that time. Reconstruction had been rolled back. The South was wracked by race riots. Three years after Washington’s speech, the
only coup in American history was orchestrated in Wilmington, North Carolina by racist thugs. Washington was basically conceding what he'd already lost. In return he hoped to simply secure the right of good Christian blacks to work the land in peace.
The dominant logic of the post-Reconstruction era held that the real problem wasn't white racists, but carpetbaggers and meddlers from up North who’d elevated illiterate blacks above their station. The white Southerner, presumably, had no existential objection to blacks, they just didn’t want to live next door to them or have an illiterate and morally degenerate population electing their politicians. To this Washington, and much of black America, said Fine. Cease fire. You let us be, we’ll let you be.
In retrospect, this was a grievous error. In point of fact, whites
actually did have an existential objection to black people. Their beef wasn’t that illiterates and moral degenerates might get too much power. Quite the opposite. Their beef was that blacks would prove to not be illiterates and moral degenerates, and thus fully able to compete with them. To see this point illustrated, one need only look at the history of race riots in the South. When white mobs set upon black communities they didn’t simply burn down the “morally degenerate” portions—they attacked the South’s burgeoning
black middle
and working class and its institutions. They went for the churches, the schools and the businesses.
The Tragedy And Betrayal Of Booker T. Washington
So you see, Booker T was wrong. And he learned how wrong he was the hard way.
But that's what whites like you want. Soft punk ass blacks that shuffle and jive at your every command. Blacks who will just shut up and take it. Cummings won't be doing that.
