W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington: Addressing the Civil Rights Crisis

W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington disagreed about the best means to realize the promise of freedom and equality for Black Americans contained in the Civil War Amendments. The argument between Washington and DuBois remains of continuing importance in American life because it helps us understand a central point of division in approaches to the same issue today: there is the party of protest, which aligns with DuBois, and a party of self-improvement, more in the spirit of Washington. Does the path to equality for Black Americans lie in protesting injustice, or in pursuing economic and cultural advancement? And to what extent are these two paths, represented by DuBois and Washington, compatible with each other?

Speakers

Diana Schaub is professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland and a visiting scholar in the Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute. She was the Garwood Teaching Fellow at Princeton University in 2011-12 and visiting professor of political theory in the Government Department at Harvard University in 2018 and 2020. She is the author of a book on Montesquieu, along with many scholarly articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is a coeditor (with Amy and Leon Kass) of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. A member of the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, she also sits on the publication committee of National Affairs and has a new book on Lincoln forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in 2021.

Terrence L. Johnson is an associate professor of religion and politics in the Department of Government and a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. He is an affiliate member of the Department of African American Studies and Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is the author of Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (Oxford 2012) and serves as co-editor of the Duke University Press Series Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People. His essays have appeared in a number of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of Africana Religions, Reading Religion and the Journal of the Society Christian Ethics. Johnson's second manuscript, We Testify with Our Lives: Black Power and the Ethical Turn in Politics explores the decline of Afro-Christianity in the post-civil rights era and the increasing efforts among African American leftists to imagine ethics and human rights activism as necessary extensions of, and possibly challenges to, political liberalism, pragmatism and liberal public philosophies rooted in individualism, neutrality and exceptionalism. A graduate of Morehouse College, Johnson received his M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University.

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