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Editor's Note: At the turn of the twentieth century two established black leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, were engaged in a bitter debate on the best course for the advancement of the Negro race. Booker T. Washington believed in the "to get along, go along" or accommodationist approach to race relations. On the education front, Washington was of the opinion that through vocational or so-called industrial training blacks would win white respect by demonstrating a commitment to hard work. Du Bois wanted blacks to he more confrontational with white segregationists. He contended that black progress could be achieved through an educational grounding in the arts and sciences which would result in the development of a black intellectual elite. But even as the differences in their outlooks widened, Du Bois and Washington maintained a mutual respect and worked together on many important projects.
ON JULY 27, 1894, the 26-year-old William Edward Burghardt Du Bois sent a letter to Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, asking whether there was a vacancy at Tuskegee for the coming term. Du Bois had just returned from two years of study in Europe and was a "Fisk and Harvard man," with a reference from Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University. Du Bois had been at Fisk with Washington's wife, so he added that Mrs. Washington "knows of me."
His training and connections were impressive, but at the time Du Bois was still an unknown figure, not yet what he was to become: a prominent public intellectual and forceful advocate of civil, political, and economic parity of blacks and whites in America. And Washington, the "Wizard of Tuskegee," was the most distinguished black educator in the country. A month passed before Washington responded with the offer of a post teaching mathematics "if terms suit" By then, Du Bois had been offered, and had accepted, another position: chair of classics at Wilberforce University in Ohio (with a salary of $800 a year). He declined a subsequent offer from Lincoln Institute in Missouri (salary $1,050) and turned down Tuskegee as well. An invitation from Washington was flattering, but ever the man of principle, Du Bois would not break his earlier commitment.
The episode set the...