science at the University of Chicago. For the professor—and his view is quite typical on the left—black political progress is essential to black socioeconomic progress. “Racial inequality remains a brute fact of life in this country,” he wrote. “In order to transform America into a just democracy, it is necessary to rebuild black politics.”15
For more than a century black leaders have tangled with one another over whether to pursue economic independence or focus their energies on integrating political, corporate, and educational institutions. W. E. B. Du Bois, author of the groundbreaking 1903 treatise The Souls of Black Folk, argued for the latter, while his contemporary, Booker T. Washington, said “political activity alone” is not the answer. In addition, wrote Washington, “you must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence and character.” Where Washington wanted to focus on self-determination through independent black schools and businesses, Du Bois argued that civil rights are more important because political power is necessary to protect any economic gains. Much has been made of this rivalry—maybe too much. What matters most is that the two men differed mainly in emphasis, not objectives. Washington never renounced equal rights, and Du Bois acknowledged the need for vocational education as a means to self-improvement.
Washington inherited the mantle of black leadership from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who gained fame through his slave memoirs and oratory and ultimately helped persuade President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1881 Washington founded Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, which trained recently freed slaves to become teachers. He became a national figure in 1895 after giving a speech in Atlanta in which he called for racial conciliation and urged blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. For the next two decades Washington would be America’s preeminent black leader. He advised presidents, and wrote an autobiography that was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by someone black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan were major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain was an admirer.
After the NAACP was established in 1909, and as Du Bois’s prominence grew, Washington’s power base weakened. But even after his death in 1915, Washington remained widely appreciated within the black community and elsewhere. Schools and parks were named in his honor. His likeness appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. In 1942 a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the one-hundredth anniversary of Washington’s birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.
But Washington’s legacy would come under assault in the 1960s, when civil rights advocates turned in earnest to protest politics. Washington had stressed self-improvement, not immediate political rights through confrontation. The new black leaders dismissed such methods, along with the man best known for utilizing them. Du Bois’s vision, by way of the NAACP, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., had prevailed. By the 1960s, “blacks throughout the United States increasingly condemned [Washington] as having acquiesced in the racial discrimination that so many were now challenging in restaurants, waiting rooms, and courthouses,” wrote Washington biographer Robert Norrell.16 John Lewis, the 1960s civil rights activist who would later become a congressman, suggested that Washington deserved to be “ridiculed and vilified by his own people for working so closely with white America.”
The black left today continues to view Washington not as a pragmatist, but as someone who naively accommodated white racism. “This distortion of Washington contributed to a narrowing of the limits Americans have put on black aspirations and accomplishments,” wrote Norrell. “After the 1960s, any understanding of the role of black leaders was cast in the context of Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership, with the implication that African Americans can rise in American life only through direct-action protests against the political order.”17 Not only has Washington’s legacy thus been maligned, but several generations of blacks have come to believe that the only legitimate means of group progress is political agitation of the NAACP-Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton variety. If you are more interested in black self-development than in keeping whites on the defensive, you’re accommodating racism.
In a January 2014 interview with the New Yorker magazine, Obama invoked Washington’s name unfavorably to push back at liberal black critics who accused the president of being insufficiently concerned with white racism. “There have been times where some thoughtful and sometimes not so thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle and me, suggesting that we are not addressing enough sort of institutional barriers and racism, and we’re engaging in sort of up-by-the-bootstraps, Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger society off the hook,” said Obama.18
“Washington’s style of interracial engagement has been all but forgotten, and when remembered, usually disparaged: he put a premium on finding consensus and empathizing with other groups, and by his example encouraged dominant groups to do the same,” wrote Norrell. “He cautioned that when people protest constantly about their mistreatment, they soon get a reputation as complainers, and others stop listening to their grievances. Blacks needed a reputation for being hard-working, intelligent, and patriotic, Washington taught, and not for being aggrieved.”19
Were Du Bois and King alive today, they would no doubt be glad to know that between 1970 and 2001 the number of black elected officials in the United States grew from fewer than fifteen hundred to more than nine thousand. But they would also have to acknowledge that this political success had not redounded to the black underclass. Between 1940 and 1960—that is, before the major civil rights victories, and at a time when black political power was nearly nonexistent—the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. Yet between 1972 and 2011—that is, after major civil rights gains, as well as the implementation of Great Society programs—it barely declined, from 32 percent to 28 percent, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972.20 By 2013 Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other state, but it also continues to have one of the highest black poverty rates in the nation.
Other measures of black well-being also don’t seem to have improved along with black political progress over the decades. Impressive socioeconomic advancement has been made and the black middle class has grown, but wide black-white gaps remain, not only with regard to income but also respecting educational achievement, labor-force participation, incarceration rates, and other measures. While blacks were steadily increasing their numbers in Congress and among elected officials at the state and local levels in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, black welfare dependency rose, as did black teen unemployment, black crime, and black births to single mothers.
The economist Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity. Many Germans came to the United States as indentured servants during colonial times, and while working to pay off the cost of the voyage they shunned politics. Only after they had risen economically did Germans begin seeking public office, culminating with the elections of Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower. Today Asian Americans are the nation’s best-educated and highest-earning racial group. A 2013 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Asians age 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees, versus 31 percent of whites and 18 percent of blacks. The median household income for Asians is $66,000, which is $12,000 more than white households and double that of black households. Yet Asians have little political clout in the United States. There have been a handful of prominent Asian American politicians, like Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, but Asians have tended to avoid politics, compared with other groups. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of elected officials grew by 23 percent among blacks but only by 4 percent among Asians. Even Asian voter participation lags behind other groups; in 2008, Asians were significantly less likely than both blacks and whites to have voted. A similar pattern can be found among Chinese populations in southeast Asia and the Caribbean, the English in Argentina, Italians in the United States, and Jews in Britain. In each case, economic gains have generally preceded political gains. “Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement,” wrote Sowell. “Nor has eager political participation