Disintegration Read Online Free PDF

lynchings.
    The same thing was happening throughout the South: the virtual re-enslavement of African Americans and a return to what racists like Grady considered the “natural” order of things. Nowhere was this bitter pill more difficult for black people to swallow than in Atlanta, where the former slaves and their descendants had come so far. There, a critical mass of black ambition had ignited what seemed an unstoppable reaction. Black educational institutions such as Atlanta University and Morehouse College were producing an educated elite. Black businesses, while still small in relative terms, were expanding and producing real economic benefits for the whole African American community. The grand project of black uplift looked so promising; now it was being snuffed out. In Atlanta, which was the intellectual center of black America, prominent thinkers waged a vital debate: What could black people do about this brutal campaign to kill the black American dream?
    It was in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, during the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895, that Booker T. Washington gave his famous—or infamous—“Atlanta Compromise” speech. He was willing for “the race” to indefinitely postpone its demands for full equality; in exchange, he demanded only the chance for African Americans to make slow, steady economic and educational progress. Once black people were sufficiently prepared, he believed, the barriers that now confined them would simply fall away.
    To the white citizens of Atlanta, Washington offered soothing reassurance:
    [You] can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful peoplethat the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours.
    And to black Atlantans, a warning not to get too uppity:
    The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house. 1
    The other side of the argument was represented by W. E. B. DuBois, the brilliant black scholar who would later be remembered as one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A Northerner who moved to Atlanta to take a professorship at Atlanta University, DuBois initially had favorable things to say about the “Atlanta Compromise,” partly out of respect for Washington and hisposition as the most powerful and influential black man in the country. Soon, though, DuBois lost both his patience and his tolerance for any kind of compromise: “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission,” he wrote in
The Souls of Black Folk
, his landmark 1903 book of essays. “[His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.”
    DuBois continued:
    Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things—
    First, political power,
    Second, insistence on civil rights,
    Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and