Booker T. Washington

IF Booker T. Washington were alive today, he’d almost certainly be deeply shaken and saddened by the state of American black culture. For Washington, the former slave and first leader of the Tuskegee Institute, civil duties came before civil rights. The main focus of the civil rights movement was not his idea and not to his liking. It instead reflected the ideology of his main adversary, the black leader W.E.B. Dubois, whose thinking was congenial to the white Marxist revolutionaries who started the NAACP and who strove to translate the Marxist dialectic of class struggle into matters of race. (Yes, the early leadership of NAACP was overwhelmingly white.)

For an excellent essay on the contrasts between these two black leaders, I recommend Ellis Washington’s 2001 article at Issues and Views, the now-defunct website which was run by Elizabeth Wright, another  eloquent black American who died several years ago from cancer and with whom I corresponded occasionally in the last years before her death.

Compare these two quotes noted by Ellis Washington:

We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free American, political, civil and social, and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.

— W.E.B. Du Bois

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist 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.

— Booker T. Washington

In 2012, a commenter at View from the Right described how the contrast between Washington and Dubois lingers in black thinking to this day.

Renee writes:

I have to agree with some of the commenters. The commenter who was surprised at the educated black man’s resentment of whites doesn’t realize that this man was educated to think the way he does. He is typical of blacks who are groomed by white liberals, but don’t know it. This phenomenon has been going on ever since W.E.B. Dubois who, until Barack Obama, was the black man who was the most influenced by white liberal thinkers ever. He also interacted with very few blacks growing up, particularly poor blacks. Contrast his ideas with that of Booker T. Washington who was an actual product of slavery and the black community, and you will see how early this trend started.

I am a (mostly) black woman who has white relatives and grew up in a predominately white Midwestern town. I went east to a very liberal college. Nothing prepared me for white liberal students’ need to verify that I was a victim of racism at every turn, and that I felt blacks were being kept out. There were very few blacks at this school, most of them slightly conservative, and we all agreed on one thing: the reason there were so few blacks there was that a school practically in the wilderness with no business program could not attract a lot of blacks. The lack of blacks was not due to racism. No white liberal would believe me on this point. I was constantly asked what it was like to be a black at this school and whether I felt uncomfortable around so many whites. I quickly learned to avoid white people obsessed with the black experience. They were only interested in being entertained by me (they would compare the black students to each other and favor those who were the most ‘hood) or in finding in me an object for their paternalism. Many blacks did not see through this.

Here’s another example of white liberals’ attitudes toward blacks. I have an African friend married to a white man. We are often at events mixed with white Americans, Africans and a few American blacks. One man who is the typical successful angry black man came regularly to some of these events. He would wait until most, but not all, of the whites had left, and then start yelling about racism and how he would kill a white man, and other violent things. I decided to tell this guy he was out of line and he had no right to talk that way. I asked him for the specific experiences he had that made him feel as if all whites were out to get him, and that he could treat all whites as if they are guilty racists. He could give me none. He merely called me a sell-out and other nasty things.

Afterwards, my African friend’s white husband told me that I needed to be more understanding and that I just didn’t understand what this guy had gone through. I asked him to be specific about what he meant by “what this guy had gone through.” He did not give me a clear answer. He made it clear he believed this guy had every right to say what he did and that I was out of line! He—the white man—thinks by taking this position he will get respect from the black man. He doesn’t understand that this guy will only tolerate his presence, but never respect him.

— Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I am a pale-faced descendant of the mixed-race gens de couleur libres of New Orleans, who created the original French Quarter of the old city when they fled Saint-Domingue, hell-bent on becoming Haiti, to avoid the racially motivated slaughter that, having run out of whites, was killing the mulattoes wholesale.  My great grand uncle Arnold Bertonneau (1832 – 1912) was an educated businessman and journalist in New Orleans in the decades on either side of the Civil War.  He accepted a commission in 1862 to be an officer in the Louisiana Native Guards, Confederate colored infantry organized for the defense of New Orleans.  When the North took New Orleans, the men of the Native Guards received the unique privilege of reforming their regiments to fight for the Union, as the Corps d’Afrique – the first Negro outfit in the Union Army.  During this period, Bertonneau contributed to and co-edited The Tribune of New Orleans, publishing three times a week in French and twice a week in English.  With his Tribune collaborator Jean-Baptiste Roudanez, Bertonneau wrote the Creole Petition, whose 150^th anniversary was last year.  The Petition began as a request that colored men, who had fought for the Union, be granted the franchise.  It morphed into a request for a universal franchise.  Bertonneau and Roudanez traveled north to Boston, New York, and Washington DC, promoting their petition.  They had an audience with President Lincoln.   The Petition went to Congress, but was tabled – and that was the end of it.  Bertonneau’s speech to the Massachusetts Legislature, “Every Man Should Stand Equal before the Law,” is so far above any of Martin Luther King’s speeches rhetorically and intellectually that he makes King look like a sophomore.  Bertonneau mounted the first court-challenge against school segregation, Bertonneau versus Board of Directors, Public Schools (Circuit Court D – Louisiana – Nov. Term, 1878), on behalf of his children.

Why have we all heard of Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King, but not Arnold Bertonneau or his active younger brother (my great-grandfather) Albert Bertonneau?  Why have we never heard of the Native Guards or the Corps d’Afrique?

Before 1880 or so, Bertonneau felt powerfully that his people, the gens, had been betrayed by whites, but after 1880 or so, he, and many others of the gens began to feel that their efforts on behalf of blacks and people of color were unappreciated by blacks and people of color.  Because most of the Bertonneau clan was light-skinned and could pass as white, the family began an emigration en masse to California, where they settled in Pasadena and Highland Park and became productive members of the community.  My great uncle Arnold Bertonneau served as President of the Rose Pageant Committee and devised the cross-town football game that has accompanied the Pageant ever since.  He was recruited by the local Republican Party to run for mayor of Pasadena, but declined, explaining to the recruiters that the Democrats would make an issue of his racial background and stir up a scandal.  My father, whose birth certificate (Orleans Parish 5 October 1911) classified him as “colored,” became a fireman on the Los Angeles City Fire Department and worked his way up to Battalion Chief.  One of my uncles invented group health insurance.  Another uncle, more visibly Negro than his brothers and sister, took early advantage of affirmative action to gain promotion in the Post Office.

My brother is, quite literally, a retired rocket-scientist, a former protégé of Wernher von Braun, a former Vice-President of North American Aviation’s Rocketdyne Aerospace Division, and after his Apollo-program-related aerospace career, a pioneer of the commercial and home-computer business.  For what it is worth, I once earned a Ph.D. from the single most competitive humanities graduate program at UCLA.  My sister runs and advertising agency.  My niece is a Senior Vice President of a major movie studio.

All this family-history has a bearing on the discussion of Washington versus Dubois.  Washington accepted the standards of civilization and urged blacks to assimilate to them.  Dubois, a thoroughly indoctrinated Marxist, hated the standards of civilization and conceived a plan to swindle blacks into allying themselves with revolution.  Arnold Bertonneau’s position, I believe, was not precisely Washington’s, but it resembled Washington’s.  Joining the productive sector, contributing positively to the community through work and education, trumped the politics of resentment absolutely.  People cannot achieve through bitterness, hostility, and resentment – they can only be bitter, hostile, and resentful.

Arnold Bertonneau, circa 1880

Mark Jaws writes:

Let’s be perfectly honest.  The early leadership of the NAACP was heavily Jewish, as the NAACP wiki entry clearly states:

On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City’s Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee….The conference resulted in a more influential and diverse organization, where the leadership was predominantly white and heavily Jewish American. In fact, at its founding, the NAACP had only one African American on its executive board, Du Bois himself. It did not elect a black president until 1975, although executive directors had been African-American. The Jewish community contributed greatly to the NAACP’s founding and continued financing. Jewish historian Howard Sachar writes in his book A History of Jews in America of how, “In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of the NAACP and recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.”^[19] Early Jewish-American co-founders included Julius Rosenwald, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch and Wise. 

Once it came under the influence of Jewish political reformers, the NAACP was ultimately destined to end up where it is today.  Booker T. Washington had it right.  Political power can only be meaningful if it is backed up by economic power.  That is how the Jews in America had been able to rise to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th century, through economic power.  It is a shame – no, worse, a tragedy – that the Jewish leaders of the NAACP did not follow their own formula for success when it came to their black “benefactors”.

Bill R. writes:

Mark Jaws is correct to point out the heavy Jewish influence in the early NAACP and, I would say, the civil rights movement in general. Indeed, there simply never would have been a civil rights movement had it not been for Jewish influence. They were its brains and most of its money. At least, that is, not the W.E.B. Du Bois-inspired civil rights movement we actually went through. There could have been a Booker T. Washington-inspired civil rights movement (or could there have been?). But it would have gotten no help from Jews and would have entailed the very opposite focus of attention. In short, its primary purpose would have been to call for a change in the behavior of blacks, rather than whites. Of course, a civil rights movement that put the emphasis on Negro self-transformation and responsibility would not have served Jewish interests, which had nothing to do with anything that would have really helped and uplifted blacks, and everything to do with criticizing, condemning, blaming, and instilling more collective guilt into the white gentile civilization the Jew sees as the greatest threat to his race, and therefore seeks to undermine and ultimately destroy by convincing it of its own moral bankruptcy; in fact, of its irredeemable moral turpitude. The latter is nowhere better illustrated, so the Jew would have us believe, than by that civilization’s racism, by the white European’s unparalleled history of torment, oppression, exploitation, and bottomless contempt toward all non-white races, but worst of all toward blacks. Sadly, and to his own immeasurable detriment, the American Negro has been a tremendously useful and effective tool for the Jew (and his gentile allies) in the promotion of this cause. The devastation that has been wrought among American blacks in order to advance it has been so vast it is impossible to calculate, and for generations to come they will still be suffering its consequences. Looking back someday, perhaps one of those future generations will call this catastrophe for blacks the “Negro Holocaust.” It is important to note, however, that the Jew does not and could not advance this cause without a huge and persistent reservoir of ideological allies among left-wing white gentiles (to say nothing of blacks, themselves, of course, particularly those in power, and the more talented and able in general, who have always benefited the most from Du Bois-style “civil rights”).

Mark Jaws writes, “It is a shame – no, worse, a tragedy – that the Jewish leaders of the NAACP did not follow their own formula for success when it came to their black ‘benefactors.'”

Because of racial differences in ability, in a true meritocracy, the Negro, on average, will never be nearly as successful as a white or a Jew. However, the inspiration of Booker T. Washington would certainly have done more to maximize the Negro’s potential than anything he’s gotten from following W.E.B. Du Bois.

Laura writes:

If you mean “successful” in the sense of professional status and wealth, yes, but blacks can be as successful in terms of having useful work and mastering it, as Booker T. Washington advocated.

Jewish influence in the civil rights movement was often motivated by genuine idealism and the sincere belief that blacks would be lifted up. I entirely agree with you that the result was vast moral oppression for blacks, but I think it is wrong to see the effort as the product of pure animus. There was also a great deal of good will on the part of Jewish idealists. The religion of universal brotherhood — of salvation on earth through equality — is a deeply attractive religion (it’s a heresy and therefore includes elements of the truth), especially to Jews, repelled as they often are by Talmudism and yet still bearing its ancient prejudices against the Jewish Messiah. Jews too have been the victims of thought control. Their leaders have kept them from the truth.

Marcus Garvey was another black leader who was disdained by the NAACP elite. He did not think integration would be good for blacks and attracted many thousands of blacks to his call for black nationalism and an African homeland. He received no support from the Marxist elite, who insisted on full and immediate integration.

Bill R. writes:

You write, “If you mean ‘successful’ in the sense of professional status and wealth, yes, but blacks can be as successful in terms of having useful work and mastering it.”

Yes, I did mean “successful” in that sense; materially, economically successful. And thank you for mentioning the distinction because it is an important one. Moral success, by no means, always corresponds with material success.

You write, “I think it is wrong to see the effort as the product of pure animus. There was also a great deal of good will on the part of Jewish idealists.”

Well, I would certainly not suggest that there were no Jews at all who were motivated by good will and altruism toward blacks. Also, when you speak of “pure animus,” remember, I’m not suggesting the Jew behaves this way because he just enjoys disliking and being unkind to the majority culture. He does this because he believes it’s what he needs to do to protect his own race. In and of itself, that motive is admirable.

The problem I have with giving Jews further moral credit along those lines, as I have noted before, stems from the rampant double standard that the Jew applies (and is more than intelligent enough to be aware of and understand) when it comes to what he advocates for that majority culture, on the one hand, and what he advocates for himself and his fellow Jews, on the other, and additionally, from the “vanishingly thin line” Lawrence Auster spoke of “between the Jewish desire to be protected from the majority culture, and the Jewish desire to destroy the majority culture.”

Furthermore, I would maintain that all or nearly all of the Jews who led the civil rights movement and preached integration for the majority white European culture, not only had the opposite in mind for themselves and their fellow Jews collectively, but that this was also exemplified in their personal lives. In the Lawrence Auster piece quoted above, he attacked Harvard professor and famed appellate lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz, noting that, “the Jewish double standard as embodied by Dershowitz is no mere ethnocentric bias. It is a blind, unreasonable, unappeasable force [emphasis added].” He writes further that, “[Dershowitz] lived a life apart as a Jew, yet at the same time he expected high-society lawyers to staff their firms with people who couldn’t socialize with them. And he calls them bigots for not wanting to do this!” Again, “While he wants is to make Harvard’s past leaders into non-persons [saying the president of Harvard should only be honored by the Ku Klux Klan] for the sin of preserving the predominantly gentile character of a historically Protestant institution, Dershowitz defends the exclusively Jewish character of Israel.” And, “Dershowitz regards Jewish homogeneity [as] natural, normal, necessary, and unquestionable, while he regards gentile homogeneity as the equivalent of absolute evil.”

One could go on with such examples almost endlessly. The point about Dershowitz is that he is utterly typical of the kind of Jewish intellectual that led organizations like the NAACP and made possible the civil rights movement in America. In commenting on Auster’s article, Kevin MacDonald wrote, “His dissection of Alan Dershowitz is classic—the supreme arrogance and hypocrisy of Dershowitz’s fanatic ethnocentrism that is entirely mainstream in the Jewish community. [emphasis added]”

Now, it would be wrong to expect the Jew, or a member of any other race, to put the interests of another race above their own. It’s like putting the interests of your next door neighbor’s family above those of your own family (or it should be). Again, the problem I have with the Jew involves the methods he has chosen to protect his own. And I am saying that those methods need to be exposed, acknowledged, and resisted, that these methods are destructive of the ethnic interests of white Europeans, and, for that matter, a poor strategy for Jews themselves in the long run, as they eventually invite retaliation that is based on the very same instinct for ethnic self-preservation that motivates so much of what the Jew, himself, does.

Laura writes:

I view ideology, not race, as the heart of it. Political messianism is a very Jewish phenomenon, though many others have been swept up into it too. It’s what the author E. Michael Jones has called the “opium of revolutionary fantasy” in a universe without Christ.

Mr. Jaws, who is of Jewish ancestry, writes:

I say amen to much of what Bill R has been saying. I too have documented the reams of Jewish double “standardness.” However, I really object to his use of the term “the Jew.” It congers up images of Colonel Eichmann and General Heydrich at Wannsee who viewed all Jews as deserving of the gas chamber.

Bill R needs to realize that there are millions of “little Jews,” who are as victimized by Jewish media propaganda as their Gentile neighbors. “The Jew” who manipulates the media and the culture is part of a small collective with unbridled power, arrogance, and disdain for Gentile Christians, but that type of a Jew is in the minority. I call these Jews the Kosha Nostra. However, most Jews, even those who are aware of Jewish dominance in the media, simply go with the flow out of fear of being labeled a “self loathing Jew,” as I have on numerous occasions. Furthermore, in time, even “the Jew” will likely end up like me, a semi-Semite with the ability to grasp the view points of both Jew and Gentile.

Laura writes:

Referring to someone as a “Jew” does have a harsh sound to it because the word has so often been used with nastiness and because it is phonetically harsh. Not that Bill is using it in that way, but I can’t remember in conversation or writing ever saying that someone is “a Jew.” Most people tend to refer to someone as “Jewish.”

It’s a petty issue. There’s nothing wrong with saying “the Jew.”

[Update: Actually, I initially misunderstood Mr. Jaws’ point. What he is really talking about is generalizing and saying, “The Jew does such-and-such.” He’s saying it’s inaccurate because Jews do not act in a uniform way. I understand that objection.]

Laura adds:

Apropos of the last point, David Horowitz in his book, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, wrote:

I did not identify myself as a Jew. I was a revolutionary and an internationalist. To see myself as a Jew, a member of a real community in all its human limits, with all its human faults, to identify with the claims of such a community, would have been a betrayal of the revolutionary idea.

 Bill R. writes:

I speak of “the Jew” the same way and for much the same reason as I speak of “the Negro.” I regard both as members of a different race than mine. Also, I do view both as possessing, in the main, varying positions and degrees of hostility toward mine. But forgive me if I’m skeptical that Mr. Jaws’ disapproval of my use of the term would be quite so sharp if I had been using it in the context of praise.

I do not agree at all with Mr. Jaws that Jews who are hostile to white European civilization are anything like in the minority. But I am not going to expend any further energy at present trying to argue the point since I have no patience and no respect for the predictable and inevitable — and increasingly cartoonish — invocation of Nazis and Nazism. It’s just the usual way the Jew has of firing the probervial shot across the gentile’s bow to warn him to watch his tongue. The Jew, in the words of Greg Johnson, has “fashion[ed] the holocaust into a kind of moral fetish from which whites [are supposed to] shrink like vampires from the cross.”

I refuse to shrink.

But I also see no point in debating with someone who is reduced to suggesting that my words remind him of bogeymen. If my reference to the Jew as “the Jew,” if my belief (passionately held by many Jews themselves, by the way) that the Jew is a member of a difference race than mine, if my belief that that race is, for the most part, hostile to mine — if these views congur up for the likes of Mr. Jaws the images of Eichmann and Heydrich, then so be it. That is on him. He is the one stuck seeing their image when confronted by the truth. Not me. I do not see their image in the truth. And I am not surprised at his hostility toward me anymore than I am surprised at the hostility of his race toward mine.

I will glady live with the ad hominen disapprobation of such as Mr. Jaws as my price for knowing and speaking the truth. I chalk up his disapproval — with all its colorful references to Eichmanns and Heyrichs — growing less colorful and impressive all the time, by the way, for their overuse — as another anecdote about his people that only serves to support my original point.

Mr. Jaws writes:

I think I should make one final attempt to explain my discomfort with the use of the [generalizing] term “the Jew.”  There are two reasons.  
 
First, it is inaccurate, in that it leads one to believe that ALL Jews think and act as “the Jew” does.  Based on my lifetime experience with liberal Jews, I would say these intentionally destructive Jews are no more than 20% of the Jewish population.  That is not to downplay the threat posed by left-wing political Jews.  No group is more dangerously corrosive to our civilization than they are.  They have the historical animosity, the finances, and the intellectual drive to do great harm.  
 
But trying to win the masses over, as I have tried to do over the years,  is a whole other ball game.  As a semi-Semite I have some credibility in this endeavor, but many are still not willing to listen, or simply too afraid to agree with me.  And even when I do convince them, they will inevitably make it a personal issue and remark, “Boy, you are really obsessed with this, aren’t you?”  

Bill R. writes:

June 7, 2015

Laura writes:

Again, I have to disagree strongly with Bill R. in his view of a racial conflict. In order to accept that scenario, one must believe that politically revolutionary Jews (and Mr. Jaws is right, they constitute an influential minority) have the interests of other Jews at heart. They do not have the interests of other Jews at heart. Or let’s say, they don’t have the best interests of other Jews at heart. They are against their own people. They reject the Jewish Messiah. Their war is against the Logos and they seek heaven on earth instead. This project manifests itself as anti-white because Europe is the center of Christendom. I’m not saying they don’t have their own ethnic identity and consciousness. Obviously they do, but that identity conspicuously excludes the most famous Jew in history and his many Jewish followers. The various messianic political movements heavily influenced by Jews, such as the civil rights movement which instilled destructive values in black Americans and was so different from the aspirations of blacks such as Booker T. Washington, do not ultimately constitute a racial project.

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