towards the heights. Under this new dispensation of mind, morals, and muscle, with the best whites and best blacks in sympathetic co-operation, and justice meaning the same to the weak as to the strong, the South will no longer be vexed by a race problem. Such is the teaching of Washingtonian optimism. And what is the reply of Du Boisian idealism? 56The reply is implicit in the very title of Mr. Du Bois’ book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” |Du Boisian Idealism.| “Your method of securing peace, decency, and comfort for our bodies,” say the idealists to Mr. Washington, “implies, even if successful, the degradation and atrophy of our souls.” Mr. Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints, the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate, with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. “Those who dislike amalgamation,” he says, “can best prevent it by helping to raise the negro to such a plane of intelligence and economic independence that he will never stoop to mingle his blood with those who despise him.” Mr. Washington admits to the full the mistakes of the Reconstruction Period—when the negro was made the dominant race in the South—and promises that they shall never be repeated. For Mr. Du Bois the mistake lay in not resolutely carrying through (of course, with greater wisdom and purity of purpose) the Reconstruction policy. 57He sees no reason why “the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but categorically promised to the freedmen”—should not have been literally realized. In short, while Mr. Washington is an opportunist and a man of action, Mr. Du Bois is a cloistered intransigeant. 56 |Du Boisian Idealism.| | |
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