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Summer Semester 2003
Justus-Liebig University Giessen
Term paper by: Björn Minx
Seminar: Twentieth Century African-American Literature: A Literary Survey of the
Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and Contemporary African
American Writers. ... George Clark
The quest for African American identity: passive humility or active social responsibility? The ideas of Booker T. ...
Introduction
Throughout their entire history African Americans have sought an appropriate way to find their place in US society. The consistent denial of even most basic rights during slavery and the sluggish progress in the struggle for equality after its abolition have resulted in a split identity of many African Americans. ... One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, tow unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (from: David Krasner; Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre 1895-1910, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. ...
No doubt that the desire of African Americans – as Du Bois puts it – “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” (Krasner, 9) must have been awakened very shortly after their forced arrival in the US. This quest for equality is also a search of identity because the lack of equality is accompanied by distrust, rejection, debasement and humiliation – characteristics that harm, question, if not deny the identity of the victims of this lack of social and political equality.
Various black thinkers have developed their own ideas about the way that would enable African Americans to get rid of this double-consciousness and of the racism causing it in order to live a normal life. Among those thinkers, Booker T. Washington’s concept of humility as a way to African American identity can be considered to represent one extreme; Ralph Ellison may not advocate the other extreme when he calls for individual social responsibility and action as a way to uplift the race, nevertheless this attempt is sharply contrasting the one that Booker T. ...
The following sections will deal with the different approaches for the improvement of African American life - and the idea of identity that comes along with them - in Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery” and Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man”.
Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington can easily be considered one of the most influential black leaders that African Americans ever had. He came to prominence with the founding of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an all black industrial college that stressed very much the teachings of trade or agriculture along with moral skills such as discipline, humility towards whites, appreciation of manual labor, gratitude and unselfishness. ... Together, they constitute much of his own identity but also the concept of identity that he was urging his fellow African Americans to adopt. In his eyes, the best way to improve the condition of the race, to find African Americans a place in white dominated US society – and thereby also to help them to find a notion of their identity – was made up by education, humility and acceptance of the political status quo. ...
“It seems to me,” said Booker T. ... ”
- Dudley Randall, Booker T. ... ” (Booker T. ...
The most important reason for Washington’s gospel of education is, however, that African Americans have to show that they are worthy of and fit for the duties of citizenship. When their education has elevated them to a level that proves them to be so, social equality will be granted by the white authorities. ... ”(220)
This is part of the message that is conveyed throughout the book: the uplifting of African Americans is best achieved by their agricultural and industrial education and by convincing them to remain in the South and pass on their knowledge instead of going North and “yielding to the temptation of trying to live by their wits” (Washington, 127). ...
The acceptance of the political status quo
“It seems to me”, said Booker T. ... ”
- Dudley Randall, Booker T. ... ), I, too, Sing America, New York: Hayden,1978
Social equality should however, under no circumstances, be demanded right away:
“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing…It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. ... “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Washington, 221f). ... Booker T. ... 72) - is caused by Washington’s concept of humility and submissiveness towards white people which includes the moral skills of gratitude and unselfishness. For how could one preach these two virtues and simultaneously demand political and social rights without violating the key concept of humility? ...
There is a certain affinity to whites to be discovered in the life and work of Booker T. ... Although Booker T. ... In fact, all his advice are designed to please white people, all aspirations he is supporting are full with the essentially white American values of materialism. ...
The unconditional humility Washington advised is epitomized in the Atlanta Exposition Address when he assures whites that
“we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defence of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.” (221)
All the issues that have been outlined so far show that Booker T. Washington’s approach towards a better life for blacks and towards the shaping of an individual and group identity essentially propagates hard work in order to gain white respect, to accept the social and political status as it was at the time and to live with whites, not against them, “to cultivate love” and not a “spirit of hatred” (Washington, 165), to be loyal ‘servants’ to them. ...
One identity shaping aspect that Ralph Ellison never fails to emphasize is completely disregarded in “Up from Slavery”: the African heritage and the recalling of Africa and her roots as an essential part in the process of identity shaping. Booker T. Washington does not seem to have appreciated the home continent of all African Americans living in the US today; he considers it a primitive place of “darkest heathenism” (Washington, 80) and of “wilderness through which and out of which, a good Providence has already led us” (17).
Approximate Word count = 5514
Approximate Pages = 22.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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