(W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington)
I subscribe to the Poem-A-Day email offered for free by the Academy of American Poets. It’s nice to wake up to a poem before you start dealing with your to-do lists and putting out the various fires of everyday life.
During the week, the Academy sends out a recently-written poem every day, often written by poets who are members of historically-marginalized groups. On the weekends, however, they dig into their archives and offer poems from around the turn of the twentieth century. This was the poem for today (first published in 1909) by Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr., pictured below:
Dr. Booker T. Washington to the National Negro Business League
’Tis strange indeed to hear us plead For selling and for buying When yesterday we said: “Away With all good things but dying.” The world’s ago, and we’re agog To have our first brief inning; So let’s away through surge and fog However slight the winning. What deeds have sprung from plow and pick! What bank-rolls from tomatoes! No dainty crop of rhetoric Can match one of potatoes. Ye orators of point and pith, Who force the world to heed you, What skeletons you’ll journey with Ere it is forced to feed you. A little gold won’t mar our grace, A little ease our glory. This world’s a better biding place When money clinks its story.
Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave,
Do you think the poet, Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr., agrees with Washington, or challenges him?
On the other hand, W.E.B. Du Bois, an excerpt from whose 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk you have read, believed that the struggle for equal opportunity and civil rights came first.
In a grossly simplistic terms, it can be said that Booker T. Washington’s argument was for separatism, while W.E.B. Du Bois’s was for full integration and participation in the mainstream of American society.
Read the blog post “Race, Class, Art, and Consumption” and tell me what you think. Do you think the Carters are advancing the Du Bois or the Washington model?
It’s worth nothing that John Lomax admired Booker T. Washington, calling him “wise, tolerant, a gifted orator, a great leader of his people.” It’s likely that Lomax saw the separatism advocated by Washington as an asset when it came to preserving black folk music.
