This poem is pedagogically useful in Freshman
Composition (and foundational skills) courses for several reasons. 1) It serves
as an introduction into Post-World War II American Poetry, especially
African-American Poetry. 2) It is useful for Critical Thinking, as it is
structured around the rhetorical mode of Comparison and Contrast, by showing
two sides of an argument without blatantly taking sides. 3) The dialogue/debate
presented in Dudley Randall’s 1965 poem has historical importance, and may
serve to educate people into some central issues in the “war of words” between two
powerful spokesmen that occurred a century ago. Yet the debate was not just
about two men, but about contrasting philosophies they represented: As essayist James Weldon
Johnson wrote in 1933, “One not familiar with this phase in Negro life in the
12 or 14-year period following 1903…cannot imagine the bitterness or antagonism
between the two wings.”[1]
It may not be necessary to know any more
about the debate aside from what is mentioned in the poem itself in order to
appreciate what Randall is doing, but such knowledge can deepen the reader’s
understanding of the poem. The poem also invites the reader to ask: After
reading this poem, do you identify and agree with one of the characters, both,
or neither? Is the debate still relevant today, or would it need to be updated?
Does Randall summarize and represent these two positions fairly? Does Randall
purposely leave the poem ambiguous?
One of the first things one may notice when reading
this poem, especially if one reads it aloud, is that this poem uses rhyme and
rhythm. Its rhythmic rhyming couplets may remind you of children’s books like
Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs And Ham. When this poem was first published in
1965, many contemporary poets were abandoning traditional rhyme and rhythm
schemes for “free verse” (or “blank verse”). To many of these poets, poems that
relied on end-stopped rhymes were considered anachronistic, especially if they
emphasize a sing-song quality as Randall’s poem does (as Ezra Pound put it,
almost half a century before, a poem’s ‘music’ should not sound like a metronome).
50 years later, such rhymes are still considered
taboo amongst much sophisticated academic poetry. To many, this 20th
century free-verse distinguished American writing from the traditional
European formal rhyming poetry, and was considered a sign of American modern
“freedom.” Yet, Randall’s use of these rhythmic rhymes make the poem more
immediately accessible, and also much more easy to memorize, to a more general
audience, like many of the popular songs of the time (as well as of today).
While some poets do not call song lyrics “poetry,”
in many ways song lyrics are much more like what was called poetry in America,
and elsewhere, before Ezra Pound, and others made their poetic innovations
which made poetry become less popular. Yet Randall’s use of rhyme differs from
the traditional European rhyming verse of the 17th, 18th,
and 19th century by tapping into a more populist, less specialized,
African-American (trans-literary) tradition in which abandoning rhyme was never
a sign, or badge, of “modernism” as much as it was among the white-European
literary tradition (which can also make the poem more accessible to a younger
readership than a college student, even if it runs the risk of reducing these
very serious, and powerful adult thinkers and activists, into cartoon
characters).
For all of its sing-song accessibility and seeming
simplicity, this poem becomes more and more complex upon repeated readings. The
poem’s masterful use of form, coupled with its poetic ambiguity and
suggestiveness, come alive on the page as well as on the stage. Furthermore,
its rhyme schemes and the length of each stanza help contribute to the meaning
of the poem, driving home its main point of contrast between the two historical
speakers: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
1st stanza ABBCCDD
2nd Stanza ABBDDCCEE
3rd Stanza AFFGGHH
4th Stanza AIIJJKKLL (LL could be CC)
Coda/Envoi: AA
Randall’s use of the rhyming names (or initials of
their non-last names) is a musical hook, which frames the poem. They
become rhyming stage directions in this dramatic-dialogue, signaling the
stanza breaks. The stanza structure is also worth noting. This poem alternates
between 2 stanzas of 7 lines (spoken by Booker T.) and 2 stanzas of 9 lines
(spoken by W.E.B). W.E.B. Du Bois always gets 2 more lines, and there is
clearly a thematic reason why Randall does this (even as his decision to do
this can be interpreted more than one way).
Booker T. always speaks first, and W.E.B addresses
his assertions point-by-point (even using the exact same end-rhymes in the
first two stanzas). Why does Randall do that? Historically, Booker T.
Washington came first, and was older than W.E.B Du Bois. But this device also
seems to give W.E.B. the last word. The fact that W.E.B. gets the last
word in this dialectic argument may suggest that the author Dudley Randall
himself finds W.E.B’s position more attractive, more empowering, and stronger
than Booker T’s. But the poem resists such an easy conclusion. Randall does an
admirable job of stepping out of the way and presenting the argument without
intrusive commentary that can prevent the reader from being empowered enough to
make up his or her own mind. We must look more closely at the language and
rhetoric the two historic characters in this poem use in order to understand
exactly what the debate is about.
Contrasting the statements made in the first two
stanzas, we may see that Booker T. believes that manual labor (whether hoeing,
or cooking) is more valuable than intellectual labor (studying chemistry or
Greek). W.E.B represents the antithesis to Booker T’s thesis, arguing that “the
right to cultivate the brain” is at the very least as important as rejoicing in
manual labor (“skill of hand”). On closer look, the contrast in these two
stanzas (and the positions these two men take) is not simply what they
argue, but how they argue. Randall underscores the difference in their manner
of speaking, first, by contrasting Booker T’s use of the passive voice
(“It seems to me”) with W.E.B’s use of the active voice (“I don’t
agree”). Regardless of whether the historical Booker T. actually spoke in the
passive voice much more than W.E.B. did, the fact that Randall portrays the
contrast this way, again, suggests that Randall considers W.E.B. to be a more
attractive role model. This would make sense, given the fact that Randall
himself was a writer and devout reader and thus more likely to identify with
W.E.B. Du Bois, especially during this time in which African Americans were
more encouraged to work in manual labor than be college educated (though that
was starting to change).
Yet, however passive Booker T seems, he is also
presented as a scold, chastising W.E.B. for “showing a mighty lot of cheek,”
and “sticking [his] nose” inside a book. He certainly is addressing W.E.B. in an
aggressive condescending tone, as the historical Booker T. did. By contrast,
W.E.B’s language is more elevated and more respectful of Booker T. W.E.B is not
saying that everyone has to agree with him that cultivation of the brain is
better than cultivation of the land; he’s acknowledging that both skills
(manual and intellectual) can be useful, and important.
The second half of the poem changes the subject to
the question of “Civil Rights.” Here Booker T. tells his fellow blacks, “Just keep your mouths
shut, do not grouse,/
But
work, and save, and buy a house.” W.E.B counters, “Unless you help to make the
laws/ They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.” These few lines get at
the heart of division between these two factions within the African American
community that these men represented. Washington wrote in the early 1900s in
response to calls for civil-rights legislation, “The best course to pursue in
regard to a civil rights bill in the South is to let it alone: let it alone and
it will settle itself. Good school teachers and plenty of money to pay them
will be more potent in settling the race question than any civil rights bill
and investigative committees.”[2]
While
many African Americans sided with Booker T’s position, and it did allow a large
sector of the African American community to make economic gains within the
segregated society of the early 20th century, by the time of the mid
century Civil Rights movement, a young generation of blacks had painfully
experienced over-and-over again exactly what W.E.B predicts in these poems, and
came to reject what he calls Booker T’s “little plan” of economic
self-sufficiency. Dudley Randall may seem
to be siding with Du Bois in this poem. He certainly gives him more lines, more
articulate and graceful speech, and one sees in miniature the same kind of
verbal skewering in this poem that W.E.B. had made of Booker T’s position in
his The Souls of Black Folks, yet the coda of the poem ends with a tone of
ambivalence that suggests a different reading
Dudley
Randall does purposely avoid commentary that says he agrees with one over the
other. Even though W.E.B. is getting the last word, from one perspective this
could show that he is just a more effective verbal
warrior; a better talker and writer. The repetition of their catch phrases
(“It seems to me” and “I don’t agree”) suggests an argument at a stalemate,
with neither man (or movement) able to convince the other of his point, and in
this sense, the poem becomes more a lament for their argument never reaching a
working relationship, and a very subtle plea for unity between these two
positions and legacies.
When Dudley Randall published this poem in 1965,
the Civil Rights movement was at its height. Many had fought for, and died, in
the fight against segregation, to enforce laws already on the books and put
pressure on Congress and the President to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1964.
Yet, during this time, the mass media made much of the divide between Martin
Luther King in the south and Malcolm X in the northern cities.
Because of this, some students have been tempted to
see Dudley Randall’s distinction here as a comment on the Martin/Malcolm debate
within the black community. One student wrote that, in this poem, that Booker
T. is more like Martin Luther King, while W.E.B. is like Malcolm X. Yet, the
analogy doesn’t ultimately work, since Martin Luther King at the time was
fighting, amongst other things, for the right to vote (which Booker T.
disagrees with). If anything, Malcolm X was much more skeptical that gaining
voting rights would change anything for the better. He was fighting less for
Civil Rights than Human Rights, for economic self-determination, and in this
sense shares more with Booker . Furthermore, as both Malcolm and Martin’s
thinking matured, their positions came closer together, before they were
assassinated.
In fact, by 1964, a year before Malcolm died, he
spoke of how black people must come together in unity and overcome the tendency
“we have to always be at each others’ throats” (The Ballot or The Bullet),
whether this is between the SCLC and the NOI in his day, or the Booker T/W.E.B.
debate 50 years earlier. Malcolm was assassinated in early February 1965 before
such accommodation between the two factions could be made.
Shortly
after Malcolm’s death, however, Congressmen Adam Clayton Powell Jr. introduced
a seventeen-point program on March 28, 1965, “My Black Position Paper for America’s
20 Million Negroes.” This fused the ideas of Washington and Du Bois (or Malcolm
and Martin) by demanding that the civil-rights movement “shift its emphasis to
the-two-pronged thrust of the Black Revolution: economic self-sufficiency and political power” (emphasis added).
He felt the legislation of Johnson, particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
meant nothing in the North without the economic contingent of ‘black power’ to
support it. Martin Luther King soon came to express that both were needed to create unity beyond the stalemate presented in
the poem.
Such
unity is probably needed even more today. In 1965, when Dudley Randall wrote
this poem, the choice of intellectual labor over manual labor—whether
industrial or agricultural—was seen as a form of progress as it was in when
W.E.B. wrote. Higher education/white collar jobs were less available to blacks
but were becoming more available, even as there was still the option of
choosing a job in manual labor. It’s doubtful he could have foreseen then the
dismantling of these blue-collar manual labor jobs (the good union jobs) that
has occurred in the subsequent 50 years. Once again, history changes the
meaning of the debate in the first two stanzas.
Today,
the debate in the first two stanzas of this poem is simply not as relevant in
the absence of these manual jobs, which has also served to lesson the value of
the college degree. Booker T. Washington may have been arrogant, as this poem
and many others have argued, but his argument for economic self-determination,
is not to be dismissed as the ravings of an “Uncle Tom” (or less of “a man”) as
it was to many during the Civil Rights movement. The poem is valuable as a
historic document, but also because it allows the reader to revisit this
historical debate in light of the segregation and economic disenfranchisement that
continues today.
Booker T. and W.E.B. (Dudley Randall)
“It
seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It
shows a mighty lot of cheek
To
study chemistry and Greek
When
Mister Charlie needs a hand
To
hoe the cotton on his land.
And
when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why
stick your nose inside a book?”
“I
don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“If
I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge
of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll
do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another
place for hand or cook.
Some
men rejoice in skill of hand,
And
some in cultivating land,
But
there are others who maintain
The
right to cultivate the brain.”
“It
seems to me, said Booker T.,
“That
all you folks have missed the boat
Who
shout about the right to vote,
And
spend vain days and sleepless nights
In
uproar over civil rights.
Just
keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But
work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I
don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For
what can property avail
If
dignity and justice fail?
Unless
you help to make the laws
They’ll
steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A
rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No
matter how much cash you’ve got
Speak
soft, and try your little plan,
But
as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It
seems to me,” said Booker T.
“I
don’t agree,”
Said
W.E.B.
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