[ColdNoMore]

Originally Posted by Byte1

Booker T Washington put it like this:

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

As often happens when people are desperate to search out, that which they believe justifies their own viewpoints/prejudices...a little more context is needed here.

Here is that context.

Booker T. Washington (click here)

His "Atlanta Exposition" speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote.

White leaders across the North, from politicians to industrialists, from philanthropists to churchmen, enthusiastically supported Washington, as did most middle class blacks. (Because maybe the middle-class blacks didn't want to rock the boat, which years later the "Tulsa Massacre" showed what could happen...if they did that? - CNM)

He was the organizer and central figure of a network linking like-minded black leaders throughout the nation and in effect spoke for Black America throughout his lifetime.

Meanwhile a more militant northern group, led by W. E. B. Du Bois rejected Washington's self-help and demanded recourse to politics, referring to the speech dismissively as "The Atlanta Compromise".

The critics were marginalized until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, at which point more radical black leaders rejected Washington's philosophy and demanded federal civil rights laws.

It's very telling though, that you never hear these same desperate people lining up & saying "I sure wish I had been born with black skin, because things would have been so much easier/better for me throughout my life."

Why do you suppose that is?