Dubois and Washington in the Pre-Civil Rights Era essays

Dubois and Washington in the Pre-Civil Rights Era essays To clearly assess the view of Du Bois' essential points of disagreement with Washington, today's reader must consider Washington as one of the disenfranchised whom he spoke for. Du Bois declared that the appeal of Washington's program was aimed at enterprising national leaders who sympathized with the South's leaders "... pressure of the money- makers..."(Du Bois 45) Washington had not grown to leadership in such an atmosphere of African American intellectual progress and real social interaction of the races, as did Du Bois. He would have seen no hope for a more liberal social policy. Therefore, Washington's and Du Bois' programs were based on a difference in a view that equal civil rights for ex-slaves would be the fundamental "starting point" of the race's advancement. With the surrender of most southern leaders to Jim Crow, the southern government favored economic advancement of the ex-slave above universal manhood suffrage, hoping that the federal government would no longer support advancement of the freedmen. This was evidenced by the failure of the Freedmen's Bureau. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois called it "- one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition." (Du Bois 17) In light of the conflict of the Bureau with the local government, which did not intend to allow African American social advancement, it was bound for In "Of the Sons of Master and Man", Du Bois further describes the psychological turmoil of the post-reconstruction South. "The inevitable period of retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of a war over took us."(Du Bois 124) He reminded the reader that both ruling classes of the political South and political North washed their hands of politi...