To clearly assess the view of Du Bois' essential points of
disagreement with Washington, today's reader must consider Washington as
one of the disenfranchised whom he spoke for. Du Bois declared that the
appeal of Washington's program was aimed at enterprising national leaders
who sympathized with the South's leaders "... pressure of the money-
makers..."(Du Bois 45) Washington had not grown to leadership in such an
atmosphere of African American intellectual progress and real social
interaction of the races, as did Du Bois. He would have seen no hope for a
more liberal social policy. Therefore, Washington's and Du Bois' programs
were based on a difference in a view that equal civil rights for ex-slaves
would be the fundamental "starting point" of the race's advancement.
With the surrender of most southern leaders to Jim Crow, the southern
government favored economic advancement of the ex-slave above universal
manhood suffrage, hoping that the federal government would no longer
support advancement of the freedmen. This was evidenced by the failure of
the Freedmen's Bureau. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois called it "- one
of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation
to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition." (Du Bois 17)
In light of the conflict of the Bureau with the local government, which did
not intend to allow African American social advancement, it was bound for
In "Of the Sons of Master and Man", Du Bois further describes the
psychological turmoil of the post-reconstruction South. "The inevitable
period of retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the
wake of a war over took us."(Du Bois 124) He reminded the reader that both
ruling classes of the political South and political North washed their
hands of politi...