TUSKEGEE, Ala. — What in the world is a W.E.B. Du Bois scholar doing sitting atop the university that Booker T. Washington helped to create?
It’s a question that Dr. Brian L. Johnson has been hearing since he took the helm of Tuskegee University last June as the school’s seventh president.
“There were always two traditions within the African-American community. Both Du Bois and Washington were working in concert, no matter what the perceived differences were,” Johnson says, as he glances at a full-length portrait of Washington that adorns his office wall. “They were still alive at the same time, grinding it out and addressing the needs of the people.”
Johnson, who has authored and edited seven books, including two on Du Bois, has great admiration for these two towering Black intellectuals who — despite their public feuds about the best techniques for improving the plight of Blacks in the years after slavery — managed to find time to sometimes collaborate, even as they worked to secure their individual legacies in the annals of American history.
“It’s not an either/or; it’s not a binary opposition,” Johnson says, adding that the two rivals corresponded with each other across the years and even had dinner in 1903 when Du Bois taught a summer course at Tuskegee. “We tend to fictionalize and think they just fought each other.”
Unconventional choice
To some, Johnson may have appeared the unconventional choice to become president of the private, historically Black university founded in 1881 after Reconstruction.
