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dunbar’s Search for “Representative” Men 77 Smalls’s behavior differently. He wrote, “Robert Smalls had done something, something that made him loved and hated, praised and maligned, revered and despised, but something that made him representative of the best that there is in sturdy Negro manhood.”6 Smalls’s appeal to Dunbar was his act of good faith. Dunbar recognized that, too often, slaves and freed men were given titles and respect for deeds that benefited the oppressors instead of the oppressed. Put another way, sometimes African American leaders who were accepted and lauded by members of the white community were accepted merely because they “got in the way of progress” or, if in positions of power, because they did little to help fight for equality. In Dunbar’s estimation, Smalls did not disrupt African Americans’ pursuit of equality and respect. After Dunbar explained why Smalls was a representative African American leader, he described qualities that made Booker T. Washington an important and representative figure. By the time that Dunbar’s essay was published, Washington was already a prominent African American leader. In an essay titled “Industrial Education for the Negro” included in The Negro Problem, Washington theorized that African Americans’ path to success would be best helped by investment in industrial education. He wrote, “For two hundred fifty years, I believe the way for redemption of the Negro was being prepared through industrial development.” Washington believed that slavery had given African American men and women specific labor skills they could capitalize on in the South. He maintained that “to a large degree, . . . this business contact with the Southern white man, and the industrial training on the plantations, left the Negro at the close of the war in possession of nearly all the common and skilled labor in the South.”7 Furthermore, Washington asserted: “The industries that gave the South its power, prominence and wealth prior to the Civil War were mainly the raising of cotton, sugar cane, rice and tobacco. Before the way could be prepared for the proper growing and marketing of these crops forests had to be cleared, houses to be built, public roads and railroads constructed. In all these works the Negro did most of the heavy work.”8 Although Washington was vilified by Du Bois for theorizing that African Americans should seek economic progress by way of an industrial education, Dunbar understood the value of Washington ’s theory. In spite of Du Bois’s and other prominent African Americans’ criticism of Washington, Dunbar did not fail to view Washington as another representative African American man. In his essay, Dunbar wrote eloquently about Washington’s “one idea”: “They say of this man that he is a man of one idea, but that one is a great one and he has merely concentrated all his powers upon it; in other words, he has organized himself and gone forth to gather in whatever about him was essential.”9 Dunbar realized that there were many 78 Coretta M. Pittman different ways that African American leadership could represent the collective race well, and he even acknowledged the differences among the men and women in his essay. Robert Smalls was socially different from Washington, and Washington’s educational philosophy was antithetical to Du Bois’s; however, Dunbar never asserted that one leadership quality or philosophy was better than another. He merely described the differences and allowed his readers to decide with which of the models they mostly identified. After Dunbar explained why Washington qualified as a representative African American leader, he described the positive leadership characteristics of Du Bois. None of the men discussed in Dunbar’s essay is probably more widely known than Du Bois, whose book The Souls of Black Folk and whose essay “The Talented Tenth” described the sociopolitical and intellectual crossroads many African Americans faced at the dawn of the twentieth century. Du Bois articulates many insights in The Souls of Black Folk. However, there are two I want to point out here, as they relate to his representative status. Du Bois was a man of keen insight. In The Souls of Black Folk he argued prophetically that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colorline .”10 Of course there were many problems and challenges Americans faced during the twentieth century; however, none was probably more explosive than racial conflicts during the second half of the century. W. E. B. Du Bois’s prophecy was realized in a civil rights movement that...

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