Black Conservatives

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass enunciated a more elaborate view of the world of work for Blacks by proffering the need for vocational and skilled training in order to offset the growing job competition from the increasing flow of immigrants from Europe in the mid-19th century. Seeing the immigrant threat, Douglass was the first Black leader to tilt the scale for Blacks slightly away from the struggle for the vote and civil rights toward an emphasis on work, vocational, and skills training. But Douglass was speaking mainly of Blacks, and to Blacks north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not newly freed Blacks currently behind the “cotton curtain” in the South. That is, he spoke for and to Blacks who, living in the North, were technically free and had the ballot; hence, there was no need to emphasize that point.

Booker T. Washington

After Douglass died, Booker T. Washington became the leader whose ideas are now associated with conservative thought. He basically continued Douglass's theme of the orientation to work, vocational skills, and practical training as necessary tools for Black success. Whereas Douglass could have but did not overemphasize the struggle for the ballot and civil rights, however, Washington, headquartered in Tuskegee, Alabama, and holding the position of group leader during the height of Ku Klux Klan lynchings and the creation of Jim Crow laws designed to deny the ballot to Blacks, had to walk a narrow line. For this reason, he believed he had to de-emphasize the ballot as an immediate goal and relegate it to a distant and future objective.

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