3 chapters across the catalog
Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., partnered with Booker T. Washington to build thousands of schools for Black children in the South. This partnership is cited as the foundation of the Black-Jewish alliance that fueled the civil rights movement. The hosts contrast Washington's "ground-up" approach with W.E.B. Du Bois's "Talented Tenth" theory, suggesting the two were intentionally pitted against each other.
The historical rivalry between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington is revisited, revealing that both were subject to intelligence community influence. The hosts highlight that the NAACP was steered by Joel Spingarn, while Washington's vice principal at Tuskegee was a paid undercover agent for the U.S. Army.
The historical rivalry between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington represented two different paths for Black progress: Du Bois's top-down intellectual agitation versus Washington's bottom-up industrial education. While Du Bois was backed by liberal academic institutions, Washington received millions in funding from Gilded Age elites like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to establish Southern Black schools.
