At the heart of the dispute between these two historical giants lies the question of Black liberation: “How do we get free?” It is easy for a man like Du Bois, who grew up in an integrated community and studied all over the world, to criticize the tactics of millions of people like Washington, whose lives in the Deep South dangled at the end of a white man’s whims on a daily basis. Booker T. Washington was a literal slave. For him and most Black Americans, the small amount of liberty and freedom afforded to Black people was abundantly better than being enslaved.
