I'm not sure how Ralph Luker knows what Vann Woodward and Louis Harlan taught me, but the fact is I read their writing in the 1970s and 1980s but subsequently had occasion to study some of the same issues and came to different conclusions which I argue, based on evidence, in my book. In fact I suggest in my book that Woodward and Harlan were aware of most of the evidence I present but chose to emphasize other contexts about BTW's life that I believe skew understandings of the Tuskegeean toward highly negative conclusions. Dr. Luker in fact is fairly typical of recent academic attitudes in his dismissal of Washington's relevance, based on misinformation and anachronistic judgment. All of Washington's children went to Tuskegee Institute and two went to liberal arts schools in addition--a fairly accurate reflection of BTW's acceptance of all kinds of education for black people. I didn't discuss the Tuskegee syphilis situation because it originated long after he died and we don't know how he would have responded.

Dr. Luker reflects the intense partisanship in the academy in defense of the attitudes of W.E.B. Du Bois.

We have been taught since the 1960s that, in order to exalt Du Bois, Booker Washington had to be brought low. In 1901 Du Bois wrote that Washington had come to power "at a time when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes and was concentrating its energies on dollars," and his influence was based on having taken the idea of industrial training for blacks and "broadened it from a by-path into a veritable way of life." Du Bois said Washington had embraced "so thoroughly the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism and the ideals of material prosperity" that he disparaged a black boy studying French grammar, a crassness that insulted the values of both St. Francis and Socrates. He said Washington thought other black schools--Atlanta, Howard, and Fisk universities--were failures, deserving of ridicule. Washington's positions elicited deep suspicion from blacks but admiration from whites. "Among the Negroes, Mr. Washington is still far from a popular leader."

The review was dishonest about Washington on several counts. Du Bois knew that Washington thought well of Fisk and supported it, and that he had little connection to Howard University, though later he would serve on its board. He surely had known of Washington's careful comments in support of higher education for those blacks who could put it to practical use. Du Bois had to know of the great admiration for Washington among the rank and file of blacks--the evidence of his popularity was too apparent not to see.

In 1903, in the essay entitled "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," the Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois declared Washington a black leader chosen by whites, having won their favor with his 1895 speech, which Du Bois dubbed "the Atlanta Compromise," because Washington allegedly had surrendered civil and political rights for economic opportunities. "The Atlanta Compromise" would prove to be one of the most enduring pejoratives ever coined in American letters. All white southerners liked Booker and his message, Du Bois insisted, calling him the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis. The comparison to Davis was a not-so-sly jab: Du Bois had earlier called the Confederate president a morally obtuse Teutonic character. Washington's humble way made few demands on behalf of African Americans, and the white response, Du Bois suggested, was "if that is all you and your race ask, take it." Washington's program "practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," including the denial of black citizenship rights, and the results of this offer of the palm branch were disfranchisement, segregation, and poverty for black higher education. Washington asked blacks to forego political power, civil rights, and higher education. He was "striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for the workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage." Washington advocated elementary and industrial schooling, but failed to see that none of those institutions could operate without teachers trained at the liberal-arts colleges.

This was in fact an artful and dishonest critique that carefully masked its intense partisanship. Du Bois understood precisely why Washington said what he had at Atlanta. In 1895 he himself called it a settlement of the Negro Problem, which he meant as a compliment to Booker's racial diplomacy. In "Of Mr. Booker T.," Du Bois failed to note his own earlier support or to explain why he had changed his mind to put the speech in such a negative light. He knew that Booker had neither accepted inferiority nor relinquished political or civil rights, because he had worked closely with Booker to challenge railroad discrimination and disfranchisement in Georgia. He had witnessed the racial hysteria surrounding the Sam Hose lynching and the White House dinner and most assuredly could imagine the possibility of white terrorism aimed at Tuskegee or Washington himself--yet no empathy for the precariousness of every black person's circumstances in the South of 1903 was extended to Booker. Du Bois pushed relentlessly the red herring that Washington opposed all higher education. He knew of Washington's support for Fisk University, his preference for hiring teachers from good liberal arts schools, and his frequently stated position that an academic education was entirely appropriate for blacks who could put it to use. Du Bois was party to the rancor between Tuskegee and Atlanta University that was based largely on decisions made in the foundations by white men well beyond Tuskegee control, but such complicating contextual evidence did not fit with the declaration that Washington opposed all but industrial education. Du Bois touted the saving grace of the Talented Tenth, but his numbers amounted to a much smaller fraction. His higher-education graduates accounted for about one in every 5,000 American blacks in 1903. Souls was silent about the fate of the other 4,999, and he gave Booker Washington absolutely no credit for his concern with educating the black masses. Du Bois called Washington's public statements propaganda, and while he could have disagreed with the strategy, it was partisan not to have acknowledged at least that Washington's public posture and rhetoric had the intended purpose of defusing white hysteria. If Du Bois truly did not understand the larger purpose of the propaganda of interracial peace, he may have been the only black man living in the South in 1903 so obtuse. And he had understood it in 1895, when he had written to Washington endorsing what he had said. Any man has a right to change his mind, but a fair man acknowledges he has done so.

As for Professor Lowndes comments, I argue, and give lots of evidence, that Washington pursued both a protest strategy and materialist one at the same time, though he did the former carefully and often secretively. He did virtually all the NAACP did starting a decade before the organization was founded. Du Bois, Wells, and Trotter knew that he was doing this, but they didn't like his unwillingness to hold always the protest posture--which he couldn't do and survive in Tuskegee.