The Hustle Read Online Free Page A

in the middle, forming the Black Central Area.
    In 1900, African Americans made up 406 of Seattle’s population of eighty thousand, a minuscule but unsurprising number. Most African Americans at the time—7 million out of 8 million—lived in the South. The majority worked in the fields, as hired hands or sharecroppers, tending cotton and sugarcane. The federal government’s post–Civil War Reconstruction efforts had been beaten back, replaced with Jim Crow segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, the loss of voting rights, and economic subjugation. Lynching became a popular entertainment for white southerners, with large crowds of spectators coming out to gape and enjoy themselves as black men—“strange fruit,” as Billie Holiday later sang—hung from trees. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court stamped its approval on the separation of blacks and whites, ruling that laws permitting segregation “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.”
    In response to the postemancipation plight, the seminal black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that being African American meant living with the “double consciousness” of being both black and American, of trying to survive in a society that views you as inferior because of your color. “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” Du Bois wrote. “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
    Du Bois grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard. A founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he believed that civil rights legislation and political action were needed to advance the place of African Americans. He thought that a black vanguard—the “Talented Tenth,” in his words—could set an example. As Du Bois saw it, the success of the Talented Tenth—really, the educated, black elite—would pave the way into society for the rest of black America to follow.
    Du Bois’s beliefs ran counter to those of Booker T. Washington, the country’s most influential African American. Washington, who had been born a slave, headed the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational school that taught blacks skills in trades such as agriculture and carpentry. Instead of demanding rights from whites, Washington advocated that African Americans focus on themselves first. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” he said in an 1895 speech that became known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”
    Washington, in effect, endorsed segregation: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” he said of blacks and whites, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
    Du Bois attacked Washington’s approach, arguing that accommodation without civil rights and a path to higher education would cement the status of African Americans as an inferior class. It was a battle of ideas that would set the framework for arguments about black advancement in American society for the coming decades—whether to demand rights through the political process, or to look inward and concentrate on self-improvement within the black community without regard to white America. More than a century later, as I would learn when speaking with my black teammates, the tensions between the two positions remain unresolved.
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