“A Creed for the ‘New Negro’” and “A Negro on Etiquet of Caste”

Abstract

On 13 December 1895, less than three months after Booker T. Washington gave his Atlanta Exposition Address and was hailed as the nation’s first nationally known New Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois published “A Creed for the ‘New Negro.’” At this point in his career, Du Bois, whowas teaching atWilberforce University, had not yet publicly voiced objections to Washington’s worldview and, in fact, had congratulated Washington on his “phenomenal success at Atlanta—it was a word fitly spoken” (Correspondence 39). Before being published in the Iowa State Bystander, Du Bois’s “Creed” first appeared in a now lost issue of the New York Age, whose editor, T. Thomas Fortune, was well known in the early 1890s Black press for his militant campaign against lynching and for civil rights (Thornbrough 117–25). Founded in Des Moines in 1894, the Black-owned, “fighting” Bystander relied on more established Black newspapers for its national coverage (Cotton 1; see 23). By calling his list of principles a “creed,”DuBois appealed to the religiosity and fortitude Black people drew on towithstand escalating degradations and violence within the “nadir” of Jim Crow (see Logan). The first five years of the 1890s witnessed over seven hundred documented lynchings of African Americans, continual efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, and the proliferation of laws segregating transportation and public facilities in southern states, culminating in the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 (Johnson; Seguin and Rigby). In its emphasis onmoral purity, self-reliance, and “industrial training and cooperation,” as well as its accedence to social segregation, Du Bois’s creed reads like one Washington would endorse. Yet Du Bois, even this early in his career, distinguishes his position fromWashington’s. In addition to industrial education, DuBois emphasized the need for “the cultivation of our best intellectual ability.” He calls for the “founding of a university of the negro,” later realized in the formation of Alexander Crummell’s American Negro Academy (1897), in which Du Bois served aprominent role. Inurging the “preservationofourbest racecharacteristics and products” as expressed inBlackmusic and folklore, he celebrates Black culture in itself rather than as measured by white achievement. Finally,