57 But especially does he resent the over-emphasis laid, as he thinks, on manual as opposed to intellectual training. Manual training is good; but without intellectual training it must leave the race on a low and servile level; and Mr. Washington’s “deprecation of institutions of higher learning,” is leading to a “steady withdrawal of aid” from negro universities. The spectacle of a “lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” which raised in Mr. Washington only a pitying smile, seems to Mr. Du Bois heroic and admirable. The “gospel of work and money,” he thinks, “threatens almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.” I have paused in the story of my pilgrimage in order to give a little sketch of two conflicting tendencies, embodied in two remarkable men. Mr. Washington I have called an optimist; but it must not be understood that Mr. Du Bois is wholly 58a pessimist. He even says in one place: “That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.” But is it? I wish I could share the confidence of either the optimist or the idealist. 58 17. Since writing this, I have heard Mr. Washington make a speech, and now conceive this grin to be partly, at any rate, a habit contracted in the effort to secure perfectly clear enunciation. 59 VII A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read. Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own place. (This protestation of impartiality I
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