by Mia Bay
An autodidact, Charles left behind a room full of “well-worn textbooks, bearing his name written in his own sprawling handwriting, and well-filled copybooks found in his trunk,” which the white press took as sinister evidence of his hostility toward whites. Charles had “burnt the midnight oil,” The Times-Democrat (New Orleans) maintained, and “was desirous of improving himself intellectually in order that he might conquer the hated white race.” But to Ida, who was self-educated herself, Charles’s books and papers had a far more obvious explanation. They suggested that Charles had been a man who spent “the hours after days of hard toil in trying to improve himself, both in the study of textbooks and in writing.”41 Far more familiar than The Times-Democrat with the black emigrationist literature found in Charles’s room, Ida was quite sure that “nothing ever written in the Voice of the Missions…suggest[s] that a peaceable man should turn lawbreaker, or that any man should dye his hands in his brother’s blood.” What provoked Charles was not such literature but rather the fact that he had been accosted by the police without “any warrant or other justification,” and then had a price posted on his head that authorized whites “to kill Charles at sight.” “The white people of this country may charge that he was a desperado,” a black acquaintance of Charles who was unwilling to supply his name told Wells-Barnett in August 1900, “but to the people of his own race, Robert Charles will always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.”42
Charles’s heroism, however, received little recognition from black leaders other than Wells-Barnett. Terrorized, African American leaders in New Orleans were willing to label him “a demon,” a “devil in embryo,” and a “lawless brute.” He became a suppressed memory best summed up by New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, who noted many years later: “I once knew the Robert Charles song but I found it was best for me to forget it, and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side.”43 Even in the North, Wells-Barnett’s attempt to rehabilitate Robert Charles as an icon of manly black self-defense was quixotic. In a nation where white supremacy reigned increasingly uncontested, Charles had few avowed fans even among his own people—as Morton’s comment makes clear.
Mob Rule in New Orleans never received wide circulation. Wells-Barnett’s antilynching bureau received almost no funding from the always hard-pressed Afro-American Council, forcing Wells-Barnett to issue a limited printing of Mob Rule that asked its readers “to pass this pamphlet on to another.” Ironically, the underfunded pamphlet also solicited contributions for the bureau’s work, which was grinding to a halt as a result of its money problems. By 1902, the bureau “had no funds in the treasury to pay postage much less the printer,” despite Ida’s pleas.44
Antilynching was no longer a priority for the council. Under the direction of its major funder, Booker T. Washington, it was now devoting its resources to mounting quiet legal challenges to disenfranchisement laws such as Louisiana’s grandfather clause. Intent on preserving his publicly accommodationist stand on black political rights, Washington kept these cases quiet, making the council seem moribund. Moreover, Bookerites on the council also quashed calls for a more activist organization—further eroding the council’s support among Northern blacks. In 1902, the increasingly divided organization elected T. Thomas Fortune president in an election so irregular that Wells-Barnett and several other longtime members rejected it as a Bookerite coup. Ida resigned her position in protest, while Boston radical William Monroe Trotter proclaimed that the council was now “Booker T. Washington’s in everything but name.”45 In gaining control, Washington all but killed it. Not only would Wells-Barnett never return to the council, but, along with William Monroe Trotter and W.E.B. Du Bois, she and Ferdinand Barnett were soon attacking what Du Bois called “the Tuskegee Machine.”
This embellished portrait of Du Bois appeared in the Chicago Tribune on June 18, 1903, shortly after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. Then thirty-five years old, and a professor at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois had completed undergraduate degrees at Fisk and Harvard Universities before going on to do postgraduate work at the University of Berlin and returning to Harvard to complete his doctorate. In 1896, Du Bois received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, becoming the first African American to receive that institution’s highest degree.
Today Du Bois is Washington’s most famous critic, thanks to his magisterial rebuke of Washington’s assumptions in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), but he was not Washington’s first or most influential critic. Although his 1903 essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” presented an influential challenge to Washington’s leadership, it was anticipated by both Wells-Barnett and Trotter, who both broke with Washington before Du Bois. Wells had been butting heads with Washington since he had failed to speak out on the Sam Hose lynching in 1899, and by the beginning of 1903 her critique of Washington’s accommodationism had expanded to include a discussion of the practical limits to his doctrine of industrial education. Blacks “who followed Booker T. Washington’s idea of an industrial education,” Wells-Barnett told a meeting of the Chicago Political Equality League on January 17, 1903, “have found that the trade union will not permit the negro to be a member and refused to allow him to work outside them. In the half a dozen unions which admit colored men, they find again that color is a handicap, since they are the first laid off and the last put to work.”46 Not surprisingly, both Wells-Barnett and her husband promoted the Du Bois critique of Washington in The Souls of Black Folk.
In particular, Ida commended the book to white women reformers such as Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, the Chicago settlement house, and Celia Parker Woolley, a Unitarian minister who was active in the Chicago Women’s Club. In some respects more open to Wells-Barnett’s activist brand of reform than the black women of the NACW, these progressive reformers had rallied in support of Wells-Barnett’s successful attempt to end a 1903 campaign by the Chicago Tribune to segregate the city’s schools. And that year also saw Woolley beginning to consult with Ida on her plans to establish an interracial settlement house, later established as the Frederick Douglass Center. Accordingly, Ida and her husband were among the blacks Woolley turned to when she convened “a gathering of the literati at her home near the university [of Chicago]” to discuss The Souls of Black Folk in the spring of 1903.
With the other blacks and whites at the meeting all but “united in condemning Du Bois’s views,” the Barnetts were at the center of a lively discussion in which they supported the part of the book the rest of the group opposed—“that chapter which arraigns Booker T. Washington.” It was a learning experience for Wells-Barnett and her husband. They “saw, as perhaps never before, that Mr. Washington’s views on industrial education had become an obsession with the white people of this country.” Their opposition to his views created a “warm session,” but in the end the Barnetts emerged content that they had given their audience “an entirely new view of the situation.” Moreover, Ida left planning to organize another gathering—“a meeting of our best-brained”—to promote Du Bois’s work.47
Meanwhile, in Boston, William Monroe Trotter, who would eventually become a close friend of both Barnetts, was waging a campaign against Washington that dated back to the 1890s and had shaped his professional career. Born in Ohio in 1872 but raised in Boston, Trotter was a decade younger than Wells and sixteen years younger than Washington. Like Du Bois, he was a member of the generation of blacks born after slavery. The son of an ex-slave who served in the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, he grew up in a middle-class home. His father, James Trotter, prospered after the war, allowing his son to attend Harvard University, where he excelled. William graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1895—the same year that Booker T. Washington told blacks, “We must start from where we are, at the bottom.”48
Like his fellow Harvard graduate W.E.B. Du Bois, Trotter was by his upbringing and education ill-suited to follow Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist leadership. Both men were
members of a new class of blacks that Du Bois referred to as the “talented tenth,” “the best and most capable” members of their race. Like other American leaders, they had been “schooled in the colleges and universities of the land”—and were living testimony that the most promising black Americans need not settle for an industrial education. On the contrary, Du Bois argued, blacks needed “leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people…The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”49
One such man, Trotter had little in common with the unschooled rural Southerners that Washington claimed as his constituency. Having excelled in the white schools he had attended from grade school through college, he was equally successful in business. An insurance agent and mortgage broker, he settled with his wife in a spacious home in Boston, where the Trotters’ “sitting room window” overlooked “the country as far as Blue Hill” and his “bedroom window over the bay down to…Deer Island.”50
Yet Trotter’s success did not leave him feeling content or secure. Disturbed by worsening race relations in both the North and the South, as well as black leader Booker T. Washington’s failure to challenge the erosion of black civil rights, by the late 1890s Trotter had become convinced “that pursuit of business, money, civic or literary position was like building a house upon the sands, if race prejudice and persecution and public discrimination for mere color was to spread up from the South and result in a fixed caste of color.”51 He also believed that Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist leadership was a major source of the growing white disdain for black civil rights in both the North and South.
As the new century opened, Trotter abandoned business for activism, helping to found the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which became “a forum for militant race opinion.” Moreover, along with another young black radical, George Forbes, he began a newspaper: The Guardian (Boston), which began publication on November 9, 1901, and soon became Trotter’s lifework. It was dedicated to “an extended attack on the person, prestige and racial policies of Booker T. Washington.”
William Monroe Trotter in 1905
Written with a personal animosity that brought his own character into question, Trotter’s attacks on the Alabama educator were as freewheeling as they were sustained. His paper derided Washington as a man with “leonine jaws…mastiff-like rows of teeth,” a “great cone” of a forehead and “dull and characterless eyes,” whose “medium size frame” bore “every evidence of high living.” When Washington’s daughter, Portia, was expelled from Wellesley College in 1902, the Guardian reported the news in gleeful tones. Washington’s children were “not taking to higher education like a duck to water,” Trotter’s paper noted, and “while their defect in this line is doubtless somewhat inherited, they justify to some extent their father’s well known antipathy to anything higher than the three R’s for his ‘people.’”52
But not all of Trotter’s attacks on Washington were below the belt. With the Afro-American Council claiming to represent the race as a whole, and Washington controlling the council and much of the black press, Trotter was hardly the only black radical to chafe under the Tuskegean’s “iron hand.”53 Instead, Trotter was able to mobilize a radical revolt among Du Bois and other disaffected black Northerners who had yet to break with Washington. The revolt began in 1903 when Trotter and other Boston radicals attended the Afro-American Council’s annual meeting in Louisville in 1903. Speaking before a council now firmly under Washington’s control, they proposed a resolution calling for President Theodore Roosevelt to ask Congress to reduce the political representation of Southern states that denied blacks the vote—an idea that other black radicals such as Wells-Barnett had long supported. And they also floated other, less specific measures, such as an endorsement of the statement that “agitation is the best means to secure our civil and political rights.” Led by Fortune, the council rejected all their proposals, with Washington telling the gathering, “An inch of progress is worth more than a yard of complaint.”54
Now determined to challenge Washington publicly, Trotter made a special point of attending the meeting of Boston’s National Negro Business League on July 30, 1903. Hosted by the Columbus Avenue African Methodist Episcopal Church, the meeting attracted a crowd of two thousand and featured addresses by T. Thomas Fortune and Booker T. Washington. Trotter arrived with a list of nine bitterly sarcastic questions that he planned to ask from the floor. Designed to heckle Washington, they included queries such as: “Are the rope and the torch all the race is to get under your leadership?” But before Trotter could ask a single question, the meeting degenerated into chaos. Fortune’s remarks were interrupted when someone threw a bag filled with cayenne pepper at him, which reduced him to coughing and wheezing his way through his text. And when Washington was introduced, pandemonium broke out. As the Alabama educator began to speak, “someone in the rear of the hall shouted: ‘We don’t want to hear from you Booker T. Washington. We don’t like you.’” Soon Washington’s friends and enemies were scuffling and trying to shout each other down.55 Standing on a chair to roar out his nine questions, Trotter went largely unheard. One man was stabbed in the melee, and Trotter and his sister Maud were arrested when they tried to prevent the police from arresting another member of the crowd.
In the end, Trotter silenced only himself. Washington got a chance to deliver his speech after the Boston police dragged the protesters out of the church. Still, what came to be known as “the Boston riot” helped galvanize black resistance to Washington outside of Boston. In particular, W.E.B. Du Bois, whose challenge to Washington’s leadership in The Souls of Black Folk had been more scholarly than activist, was at long last moved to take a “strong side.”
Previously unwilling to be drawn into Trotter’s war on Washington, Du Bois enjoyed a cordial relationship with both men prior to the riot. Washington had chosen to ignore Du Bois’s strictures against him in The Souls of Black Folk, and Du Bois and Trotter had an acquaintance that went back to their college years at Harvard. Indeed, Du Bois’s first news of the riot came when he visited Trotter in Boston after teaching at Tuskegee’s summer session. Du Bois arrived to find his host in jail—Trotter having received a thirty-day sentence for his role in the riot. Du Bois initially assumed that the irrepressible Trotter had brought his fate upon himself, but he soon came to believe that the riot had been “precipitated by a Washington man.” Moreover, he also realized that he could no longer “occupy the middle ground, and appease the Guardian on one hand, and the Hampton-Tuskegee idea on the other.” Accordingly, he published a letter in the Guardian which affirmed his faith in Trotter, and described him as the victim of “a petty & dishonest attack.”56
Du Bois’s public support for Trotter ended his relationship with Washington. Not content with sending Trotter to jail, Washington also sponsored a libel suit against Trotter and the Guardian’s co-owner George Forbes, and attempted to destroy their newspaper by funding a series of unsuccessful new black newspapers in Boston—all designed to depose the Guardian as that city’s black paper. Equally merciless to the now disloyal Du Bois, Washington laid siege to the faltering finances of the university that employed the young scholar by writing to “all his white philanthropist friends” denouncing Atlanta University as a school unworthy of their support.57 But Washington’s attacks only made his opponents more vocal.
The Parting of the Ways
The spring of 1904 saw Ida B. Wells-Barnett join W.E.B. Du Bois in denouncing Booker T. Washington at a symposium on “The Negro Problem from the Negro Point of View” sponsored by the monthly magazine The World Today, which Washington attended. Ignoring all other subjects, Du Bois and Wells-Barnett took on Washington’s leadership as one of the major problems that African Americans faced. In an essay titled “The Parting of the Ways,” Du Bois abandoned the respectful and measured tone he had used in The Souls of Black Folk. Sounding every bit as vituperative as Trotter, he presented a dismissive parody of Washingt
on’s ideas and politics: “As to voting, what good is it after all?” It “does not pay as well as the grocery business and breeds trouble.”58
Writing on “Booker T. Washington and His Critics,” Wells-Barnett also blasted the Tuskegean, taking aim at the folksy humor Washington used to ingratiate himself with white audiences. Washington, she charged, routinely demeaned the very people he was supposed to lead, using darky jokes to entertain the “cultured body of women at the Chicago Women’s Club.” “‘Well John, I am glad to see you are raising your own hogs,’ he began, before descending into dialect: ‘Yes, Mr. Washington, ebber since you done tol us about raisin’ our own hogs, we niggers round her hab resolved to quit stealing hogs an gwinter raise our own.’” Self-aggrandizing as well as disdainful of the hardworking farmers who struggled to make a living in the South, Wells-Barnett noted, Washington’s story went so far as to suggest that “the Negroes of the black belt as a rule were hog thieves until the coming of Tuskegee.”59
Moreover, rural black Southerners were not Washington’s only targets. His speeches also derided the labors of the “northern teachers who endured ostracism, insult and martyrdom, to bring the spelling-book and the Bible to educate those who had been slaves.” Both Wells-Barnett and Washington were educated by such teachers. But unlike the Tuskegean, Ida revered the abolitionist tradition that such teachers represented. Crucial to the advancement of the race, they had also provided Wells-Barnett with her strongest connections with the white reformers of her era, such as Albion Tourgée and Catherine Impey. Unlike younger black leaders such as Du Bois and Trotter, Wells-Barnett was old enough to have seen the talented tenth first take shape, and looked back to the glory days of Reconstruction as its site of origin. Indeed, she resented Washington’s work for denigrating the educational achievements of “the Freedmen’s Aid Society, the American Missionary Association and other such agencies which gave the Negro his first and only opportunity to secure any [of the] kind of education which his ambition and intellect craved: They have given us thousands of teachers for our schools in the South, physicians to heal our ailments, druggists, lawyers and ministers.”60
