Public Policy Research



Self-Determination and the Black Leadership Tradition

Written By: Juan Williams
Published In:
Publication Date: August 1, 2007
Publisher: The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change

The most prominent voice for black liberation before the Civil War belonged to Frederick Douglass, a former slave who secretly taught himself how to read, then became a skilled worker in Baltimore’s shipyards, before escaping to the freedom of the North. As a speaker, as the author of a book about his life in slavery, and as editor of a newspaper, the North Star, Douglass led the charge for all good people to stand against the abomination of slavery, including a call for black people to take up their won fight as a capable, strong force in American life.

Douglass was the main black leader who pressed President Lincoln to allow black people to fight with the Union forces in the name of freeing themselves from slavery. All he asked of President Lincoln was that he officially emancipate the slaves so they could legally fight for their freedom. He personally recruited blacks, including his own two sons, for two regiments in Massachusetts. He asked the president for a military commission so he could lead black people in the fight for their own freedom.

With Douglass pushing black people to be their own liberators, more than 200,000 black men put on the blue uniform of the Union. Once the war ended, he cited the black bloodshed as the basis to call for black people to be given the right to vote and become full and equal members of the American family. And to freed slaves he also insisted on self-determination, telling them, “We need mechanics as well as ministers. We must build, as well as live in houses; we must make, as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them.” It was Douglass who first called on black people to do for themselves when he wrote an editorial titled “Learn Trades or Starve.”

Douglass hammered this self-determinist ideology deep into the black American mind. By the end of the nineteenth century, as the government’s many promises to help former slaves turned out to be mostly empty words, a new black leader emerged. Booker T. Washington picked up on Douglass’s legacy by proposing defiant black self-determination as the best strategy for black advancement.

Washington wanted to build an economically powerful and independent black nation within the United States. He insisted that blacks command the respect of white citizens by virtue of independent black schools and black businesses. In seven years, between 1881 and 1888, Washington, another former slave, built the “Tuskegee Machine” in Alabama. He created a center of black education and economic activity to bring to life his vision of “black uplift.”

The basis of Washington’s strategy at Tuskegee had direct links to Douglass’s theory of black self-reliance. His idea was that black people should capitalize on the skills and knowledge they had gained as slaves. People who had worked the land for others now had the chance to own that land and take the profits of their work for themselves. He had a vision of slaves using their work experience on plantations—as carpenters, plumbers, blacksmiths, veterinarians, maids, cooks, morticians—to build a successful free black economy.

He created “wagon schools on wheels” to teach the most efficient farming techniques to black farmers who could not come to the school. He planned for black people to pool their money by pursuing a “Gospel of Wealth,” to buy the land they once worked as slaves. Washington’s plan also included educating freed slaves and their children. He created a teaching staff of the best black craftsmen and farmers around the rural South. He saw them passing along their knowledge and building a base of economic strength for black America. Though Washington sought financial support from white patrons, his strategy was aimed at making black people economically self-sufficient. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896, Washington explained his plan:

“We find that as every year we put into southern community colored men who can start a brickyard, a sawmill, a tin shop, or a printing office, men who produce something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the Negro, instead of all the dependence being on the other side, a change takes place in race relations. Let us go on for a few more years knitting our business and industrial relations into those of the white man, till a black man gets a mortgage on a white man’s house that he can foreclose at will. The white man on whose house that mortgage rests will not try to prevent that Negro from voting when he goes to the polls ... Whether he will or not, a white man respects a Negro who owns a two-story brick house.”

Unlike Douglass, Washington felt that the best approach to advancing black power in American life was to carefully time and navigate his moves according to shifts in the opinions and personalities that determined national politics. He concluded that in a nation still struggling to unite after the Civil War, and where the South remained in economic turmoil, fierce demands by black people for equal political power as a civil right was not a winning hand. Playing to the bruised egos of defeated Southern whites, Washington was willing to forgo political activism and its focus on expanding black rights in exchange for being free to build black economic strength and self-reliance. “We should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities,” he said.

That aspect of his plan struck some other black leaders as appeasement of resentful whites who fueled the Reconstruction era’s violent attempt to reverse efforts to give blacks equal rights after the Civil War. He was seen as accepting racial segregation so as not to upset white racists. Similarly, his heavy focus on teaching black people how to work with their hands, as opposed to studying the liberal arts, led critics to charge him with a lack of appreciation for the need to create black thinkers as a base for the next generation of black leaders.

Th

is is the heart of a sincere ideological split about how best to advance the interests of black people as they strive for greater power. There was no disagreement between Douglass and Washington on the importance of black self-reliance and independence as the key to black progress. But there were some clear differences in their tactics and language.

At the time of Washington’s rise, Douglass’s influence was in decline. There was no black leader who compared to Washington in the reach of his influence and contacts in the world of white philanthropy and politics. But W.E.B. DuBois, the writer and political activist, stood tall enough as a social critic to offer a different point of view. And it is DuBois’s respectful criticism of Washington that misled some black leaders to this day to lose sight of the mainstream of agreement in the foundational black leadership tradition. That devotion to self-determination was established by Douglass, Washington, and DuBois.

Juan Williams is a senior correspondent for National Public Radio. He also is a political analyst for the Fox News Channel and a panelist on Fox News Sunday. He is the author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary and Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.