5 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.
A detailed history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1932-1972) is provided, where 600 Black men were denied treatment for "bad blood" so researchers could observe the disease's progression. The hosts highlight the role of Black elites like R.R. Moton and Dr. Eugene Dibble in facilitating the study to appease white philanthropists. They contrast the $9 million settlement for Tuskegee victims with a $1 billion lawsuit involving similar experiments in Guatemala.
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.
Talib Starks introduces the concept of "urban terrorism," citing DOJ statistics that show Black Americans account for over half of homicide offenders despite being 13% of the population. He makes a controversial comparison, stating that black-on-black murders every six months eclipse the total number of lynchings over 86 years. Mo criticizes this as a false equivalency that ignores white-on-white crime.
