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Washington’s subversive challenge to southern separatism, particularly with regard to education and handwork, can be seen throughout all his autobiographies, but in none more clearly than Working with the Hands, which appeared in 1904 and was marketed as a sequel to Up From Slavery. Working with the Hands covers some of same ground as Up From Slavery, but it focuses much more closely on labor and education. No doubt it was written in part as a response to the ferocious attacks from W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders that were directed at Washington’s program of industrial education at Tuskegee. To Du Bois and others, there was nothing “higher” in the higher education that black students were receiving at Tuskegee. In his essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” which appeared in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that education at Tuskegee was “becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life” (39). He characterized it at one point as “industrial slavery and civic death” (42). In another essay from Souls, “Of the Training of Black Men,” written with Washington clearly in mind, Du Bois argued that industrial education was merely a temporary fix to an economic problem, a program for teaching trades and little else, and one that in ignoring the cultivation of higher pursuits of the mind condemned students to stunted lives of toil.

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