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In contrast to WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington's reality was dominated by white supremacy enforced
by law and social terrorism. He believed the route to African American prosperity could
not be achieved by pushing equality with whites, but rather seeking to build one's own communities
with the infrastructure and institutions to become self-sufficient and self sustaining,
thus making the need for social integration a moot point.
The ideology which would later become the core of Black Nationalism has six central
and overlapping characteristics. The first, cultural nationalism emphasizes that black
people have a culture, style of life, and approach the problems of existence that is
distinct from white Americans in particular and Westerners in general. As such, black
nationalists tend to place a heavy emphasis on African-centered education, religion, and
culture. Closely linked to cultural nationalism is
religious nationalism. One can see elements of religious nationalism in African-American
churches which tend to be styled upon traditional West African modes of worship. For example,
the relationship between the pulpit and the congregation is very different in an African-American
church than you would find in most other churches in that the congregation is much more an active
part sermon. Spontaneous shouts of affirmation and call and response between the pulpit and
the congregation are direct offshoot of a West African expression of spirituality. There
are also non-Christian varieties of religious nationalism such as the Nation of Islam which
will be discussed in unit 4, as well as various Afro-Caribbean hybrids of Christianity and
Roman Catholicism such as Vodou in Haiti or Santeria in Cuba.
Another aspect of Black Nationalism is a notion of economic nationalism which includes both
capitalist and socialist forms. The capitalist form would probably be most familiar to Booker
T. Washington stressing the economic development of one's own community. Economic nationalists
often stressed that African Americans should patronize only black owned businesses and
spend their dollars in their own communities. A socialist approach towards economic nationalism
also includes building up the economic resources of one's own community but also includes the
notion that the community has a responsibility to look out for the individual needs of each
community member. That sentiment is often expressed in the West African proverb "it
takes a village to raise a child." The socialist black nationalist economic approach to will
be seen later in organizations such as the Black Panther party which saw it as the responsibility
of the black community to provide for each others basic needs. For example, the Black
Panther Party included a free breakfast for children program, free health clinics in the
community, and its own sort of community policing program to provide protection for the community
in the face of police brutality. Political expressions of Black Nationalism
stress political solidarity within the black community and can be approached by reform
of the political process or a revolutionary approach which advocates the overthrow existing
political and economic institutions. After his break with the Nation of Islam, will see
in the political platform of Malcolm X., for example a heavy emphasis on political solidarity
with African Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere as well as the continent of Africa
and persons of African descent throughout the globe. He pursued an agenda of putting
forward a united front and tackling issues such as apartheid in South Africa and segregation
in the United States as smaller subcomponents of the same larger issue.
Emigrationism is a component of Black Nationalism that also expresses itself in two forms. It
emphasizes that persons of African descent are better off with their own sense of nationhood
as an autonomous sovereign entity. The Back-to-Africa movement stresses a physical return back to
the continent of Africa. Probably the most notable proponents of the back to Africa movement
was Marcus Garvey, but many others African Americans have shared this view since the
post-revolutionary period in the early 1800s. But other black nationalists have rejected
a physical return to the African continent in favor of carving out a separate autonomous
territory within the United States for African Americans. The "Plan of San Diego," discussed
in your book, Black and Brown: African Americans in the Mexican Revolution, is one manifestation
of this principle. Later, Malcolm X. would point out that persons of African descent
had provided the economic underpinnings of the wealth of the United States through 250+
years of slave labor, and thus should be entitled to their own autonomous state within the boundaries
of the United States. Look for these various expressions of black
nationalism throughout the course of the semester in the Universal *** Improvement Association,
the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther party, and the political ideology of people like
Stokely Carmichael a.k.a. Kwame Toure.
It's easy to see the built-in conflict between the approach of WEB Du Bois and the NAACP
and the Black Nationalist approach of Booker T. Washington -- the former basing its fundamental
approach based on integration and the latter approaching problems based on separatism.
This is the same fundamental difference in worldview that's going to frame the ideological
divide between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (although I believe that's been largely
overplayed), and even more so between Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael a.k.a.
Kwame Toure. This is another one of those patterns that will see over and over again
throughout the course this semester. Just as we see with Du Bois and Washington, the
feud between the various ideologies later on is going to get ugly. They will often be
quite ruthless in the way they undermine one another. As we will see, the NAACP cooperated
with the FBI in the prosecution of Marcus Garvey that led to his exile from the United
States Thurgood Marshall, also would later cooperate with the FBI in undermining the
Nation of Islam. Alex Haley, the author of roots was actually hired by the FBI when he
was working as a journalist to develop negative articles on the Nation of Islam. In the early
1900s we've seen how Washington manipulated the power structure to marginalize his political
rivals, and it's pretty safe to say that there was no love lost between WEB Du Bois and Booker
T. Washington. Because the NAACP was integrationists group
bent on integrating into the white power structure and the organization has always had large
numbers of liberal whites as members, Booker T. Washington attacked Du Bois as a puppet
for white people. The irony here, of course, is that Booker T. Washington also sought the
support of the white elite and, quite frankly, white supremacists in forwarding his own agenda.
Herein lies the central weakness of black nationalism as an approach to problems. The
central paradox here is that separatism from the white political and economic power structure,
and the building of an economic and political power structure within the black community
begs the obvious question -- how does one build a political and economic power base
when very goal is to separate itself from political and economic systems of power? It's
a dilemma that Washington recognized early on as he sought economic backing from elite
white benefactors. Despite efforts to separate from whites in the interest of self-sufficiency,
the old adage that it takes money to make money ultimately makes the black nationalist
agenda nearly impossible to attain without some measure of support from the very institutions
that they're seeking to separate from.