3.8 Lifting as We Climb: Uplift Ideologies and Black Women’s Rights and Leadership

Booker T. Washington, born enslaved, built Tuskegee Institute in Alabama into a leading school of industrial education, training students in farming, building trades and teaching. He believed economic independence was the surest path to advancement.

In his 'Atlanta Exposition Address' (1895), a required source, Washington urged Black Southerners to stay in the South ('Cast down your bucket where you are'), learn trades and build wealth, and put off demands for social equality and political rights for now. To a white audience he offered that 'In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.' Critics later called the speech the Atlanta Compromise.

W.E.B. Du Bois argued that Washington accepted too much. In The Souls of Black Folk (3.7), he criticized Washington for asking Black people to give up political power, civil rights and higher education. Du Bois promoted a liberal arts education and a civil rights agenda, arguing that a 'Talented Tenth' of college-educated leaders should lead the fight for full equality. He helped found the Niagara Movement (1905) and the NAACP (1909).

Both men wanted Black advancement; they disagreed about strategy and timing. Washington focused on economic security under existing conditions, while Du Bois demanded equal rights immediately.

Anna Julia Cooper, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her enslaver, became an educator and scholar. In A Voice from the South (1892), she argued that the race could only rise if Black women did. She wrote, 'Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”' She also criticized histories that left out Black voices, especially Black women's.

Nannie Helen Burroughs, a daughter of formerly enslaved parents, was an educator, suffragist and church leader. In 'How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping' (1900), she called on Black Baptist churches to let women organize and lead. She helped build the National Association of Colored Women and in 1909 founded a school for women and girls in Washington, D.C.

Black women formed clubs and church groups that countered race and gender stereotypes by showing Black women's dignity, ability, beauty and strength. The National Association of Colored Women (1896) took the motto 'Lifting as We Climb'. Many Black women also worked to support their families, organized labor unions for fair treatment, and fought for women's suffrage.

James Weldon Johnson wrote this poem, and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson set it to music, for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday at a school in Jacksonville, Florida. Its lyrics honor the struggles of the past and look toward a hopeful future. The NAACP later promoted it, and it became known as the Black National Anthem.