BURSTING INTO COMMUNITY: THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF WILLIAM PICKENS

JOSÉ ENDOENÇA MARTINS

Abstract
The article discusses William Pickens’s intellectual life during the first half of the twentieth-century. It places Pickens between two great modalities of intellectual involvement with black community: Washington’s and Du Bois’s. The article concludes that Pickens makes the sinthesis of these two views of intellectual experience in Black America.

Resumo
O artigo discute a vida intelectual de William Pickens na primeira metade do século vinte. Coloca Pickens entre duas modalidades de envolvimento intelectual com a comunidade negra: a de Washington e de Du Bois. O artigo conclui que Pickens faz a síntese destas duas visões da experiência intelectual na América Negra.

In the first half of the Nineteenth-century, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Pickens show strong desire to burst ino community. Their common interest is to unite blacks and whites in order to uplift the black race. Washigton works hard to “cement the friendship of the two races and bring about hearty cooperation between them” (90) . He believes this cooperation will help promote his people’s vocational education. Du Bois also wants the two races “to see and appreciate and sympathise with other position” (113) . He argues that more than vocational training his people are in need of higher education. William Pickens keeps these two views of the negro education in a dialect perspective, as he moves from one to the other.
Washington’s agenda for the Negro’s vocational education demands a special kind of intellectual. Remarking that Washington “elevates men of action to the putative leadership of his people” (253) Andrews implies that the Washingtonean intellectual is the pragmatic activist who privileges action, because action, and production of things. As a pragmatic man of action, the Washingtonean leader addresses himself to the Negro’s vocational education for he believes that this is the best way to turn a Negro into a productive man, the man needed for the economic improvement of the race after slavery. Therefore the pragmatist’s adherence to the Negro’s vocational education values the participation of the black and white races in cementing “the friendship of the two races” (99) . For such an inter-racial friendship to succeed, Washington attributes specific roles for each race. For the blacks he prescribes the action that leads the Negro’s “brains and skill into the common occupations of life” (100) . He argues that the Negro’s life will improve “by the production of our hands”, in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions” (100) . Here the job of the intellectual of action is to make all his “efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him [the Negro] the most useful and intelligent citizen” (101) . Thus, the Negro’s usefulness would benefit the entire South, not only the black race. That is, prepared by pragmatists, the “useful and intelligent citizen” would contribute to “the business and industrial prosperity of the South” (101) .
Similarly, the Washingtonean intellectual has also a role to play among the whites. His task is to convince the white community that the Negro’s vocational education fits the white people’s interests. He will invite the white race to invest in the Negro’s preparation if it wishes to benefit from black education and tilling of the white race’s fields. The whites receive an appealing request from Washington: “cast down your bucket where you are” (100) , that is, among the Negroes. In practical action, the whites are invited to sponsor the Negro’s industrial training. Washington supports his request on a strong appeal for the whites: the Negroes, he says, “have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the South” (100) . He convinces the whites that the investment in the Negro’s training will generate extraordinary gains, and will enrich the white South. The pragmatic intellectual will echo Washington’s words and will persuade the white race of the validity of his educational agenda. He will say to the whites Washington’s words:
Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as your are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand and heart, you [the whites] will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories (100) .
Due to a convincing agenda Washington’s endeavor towards the Negro’s vocational education and manual training have achieved durable recognition among Southern black intellectuals. Among them, Du Bois recognizes the validity of both Washington’s and the Washintonean intellectual’s instructional enterprise for the Southern Negro. Du Bois acknowledges Washington’s good reception among blacks and whites, suggesting that “he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions” (26) . Du Bois’s recognition of Washington’s leadership highlights the Tuskegeean’s ability to establish “a simple definite programme” for both the Negro’s “industrial education” and “conciliation of the South” (25) . Through “enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith”, Du Bois continues, Washington turns education and conciliation “into a veritable way of Life” (25/6) for all black and white Southerners. Insisting that Washington’s educational program captures the spirit of a time, Du Bois remarks that it mirrors “the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism and the ideals of material prosperity” (26) . As a result of such an ability, Du Bois stresses, Washington is seen as a leader of the two races and works as “a compromiser between the South, the North and the Negro” (30) . Du Bois concludes that Washington’s commitment to the Negro’s economic empowerment achieves a triple result: he transforms the Negroes into “artisans business men and property-owners”, affirms the black race’s “thrift and self-respect”, and validates the black Americans’ access to “common-school and industrial training” (31) .
Du Bois’s (1903) praise of Washington’s educational program for the Southern Negro is neither a capitulation to the Tuskegeean’s leadership nor an adherence to his educational agenda. On the contrary, it is a cautious evaluation of the strengths of Washington’s instructional program and a conscious alertness against its weaknesses. However, conflicts separate the Washingtonean man of action from the Du Boisean man of word. Andrews indicates what disrupts these two models of intellectual life within the black community. He suggests that the Tuskegeean criticizes black politicians, preachers, and educators like Du Bois for having “too often made speaking and writing a refuge from doing, from working productively for the good of the race” (253) . Washington himself values the education of men who do over that of men who speak, writing that “instead of studying books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things” (30) . To such an accusation of non-productivity the Du Boisean intellectual responds with the charge that Washington’s insistence on manual production “represents in the Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission”, “accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races”, and invites “race-prejudice against Negroes” (30) . Du Bois’s response works like an urging call for subordinating Washington’s vocational education to a more encompassing notion of education than the manual training of the Negro race. The Du Boisean intellectual believes that a subordinating relationship must link higher education and vocational training, in which the former prepares the latter.
The position of the Du Boisean intellectual favoring higher education as prior to its vocational modality is crucial. He first must recognize that, like any other Negro in America, he is marked by a double consciousness, or a lack of “true self-consciousness”, defined by Du Bois as the Negro’s perception of “himself through the revelation the other world” (2) . This doubleness is “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” who look at you “in amused contempt and pity” (2) . Du Bois remarks that the double Negro “ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (2) . Immersed in this duplicity, Du Bois adds, the American Negro “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” (3) . Du Bois’s emphasis is placed on the double Negro’s will to succeed in being a Negro and an American, an intellectual struggle that manages to mingle freedom, work, love and aspiration. He advances,

Work, culture, liberty – all these we need not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of race” (7) .

Du Bois insists on the togetherness of work, culture and liberty as the core aspect of his intellectual agenda. His belief in the merger of these three elements, rather than on their split, conceptually reflects his views of intraracial solidarity. Common and higher education and training for life are required to enhance the Negro’s work, culture and liberty. Education and training for Negro teachers is the first step towards the black race’s access to the high values of universal civilization and culture. As he he writes, “if the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers” (60) . Such a model of education presents well-defined aims. On the one hand, it deals with the teachers’ and leaders’ necessary preparation and, on the other, it furnishes “the black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideal of life” (60) . The Negro’s preparation for civilization and book training will elevate these teachers and leaders as the living examples of men and women of mind and culture, necessary and useful to the development of both common and industrial schools, and to the establishment of college and university education in the South. These institutions of common and higher education and training, Du Bois remarks, aim to challenge the Negro to raise himself “out the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them” (62) . These Southern institutions have become the houses which favor the Negro’s “close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England” (62) . Important in Du Bois’s words is the black students’ togetherness. They: “lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living souls (62) . These teachers and leaders develop steady and faithful job in the black training schools and institutes, including Washington’s Tuskegee. They are also among the religious leaders, physicians and lawyers who favor the triumph of American civilization in connection with white educators. Du Bois assures that these teachers and leaders contribute to maintaining “the standards of popular education” seeking “the social regeneration of the Negro” and, finally, helping “in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation” (66) . They educate the Negro men and women who will perform challenging tasks. They “persist and evolve that higher individualism which the center of culture protect”, and will develop “a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks” (66) universal cultural gains. As a result of the contact with universal knowledge the black soul will “know itself and the world about it”, will conquer “a freedom for expansion and self-development” and will “love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new” (66) . Thus, fully aware of what the Negro aspires for himself, the teachers and leaders can deal more effectively with the racial solidarity that exists among blacks and whites.
In the long run, the achievement of these teachers and leaders will be made clear: “the increasing civilization of the Negro” and “the development of higher classes” (110) of blacks in various areas. As a result of such an improvement in the Negro’s education, Du Bois argues, the South will see “increasing numbers of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks” (110) . As leaders, they will build the bridge that may establish common interests for blacks and whites and produce the kind of humane progress that benefits the two races. As Du Bois himself remarks, “human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and co-operation among classes who would scorn charity” (112) . In addition, he believes that if intraracial integration must exist between blacks and whites, then, the task of making them effective and productive requires from both black and white leaders the ability to work together. He adds that the future of this inter-racial enterprise

Depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with other’s position, - for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice (113) .

Williams Pickens calls for himself the responsibility for uplifting the black race that Du Bois associates with black teachers and leaders. Pickens carries out this task in two phases of his life, different but complementary. Initially, as a Washingtonean intellectual, he identifies with Washington’s educational agenda and guides his “brains and skill into the common occupations of life” (100) . Later he moves to Du Bois’s instructional orientation and supports the idea that “work, culture and liberty”, “each growing and aiding each” (7) should be the aim of each black American. Bursting Bonds, his autobiography, clearly reflects these two moments in Pickens’s career: The Heir of Slaves echoing his closeness to the Tuskegeean’s activism, Bursting Bonds mirroring his conversion to the Niagaran’s ideals.
The Heir of Slaves echoes the Washingtonean activism and pragmatism in his struggle for education and work. Like Washington’s, Pickens’s humble origin makes the interdependence between education and work even more crucial. From his first steps at school to his last years at Yale, education and work go together. Washington’s autobiography sheds light over Pickens’s career. Prior to Picken, he manages to associate daily work with nightly lessons, telling that “after a while I succeeded in making arrangements with the teacher to give me some lessons at night, after the day’s work was done” (20) . Later, Washington’s education at the Hampton Institute is again marked by the same pattern of behavior. He dreams “at once to go to that school” (24) and in order to make this dream come true he makes money by taking many different jobs: in a salt-furnace, coal-mine, with Mrs. Ruffner’s, in a ship and as janitor at the Hampton Institute. From this experience of work, action, education and the encounter with General Armstrong, a model of action and founder of the school, Washington extracts the orientation that will govern his future pragmatic experience in his Tuskegee Institute. He writes

The older I grew, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women. Instead of studying books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things! (30)

In a similar way, Pickens describes the ties linking his life to education and work, makes clear that without one the other cannot happen. Like Washington, Pickens comes from a humble family whose earnings cannot afford providing education for the children. If work guarantees the necessary funds for his schooling, education gives him the necessary strength and motivation to bear the hardest kinds of job. Work and education are nurtured by discipline and assiduousness. As he states, “after Christmas, however, I started in school not to miss another day during that school year – not to miss another day for the next seven years’ school years – and indeed not to miss another unnecessary day until I had finished at Yale in 1904.” (13) He views the hard work as a ferry-rower at Argenta as a temporary, but necessary, burden which will provide the funding for his education. He describes the usefulness of this strenuous activity in relation to the future gains from education. “And boy although I was”, he tells, “I looked at the present circumstance in the light of the future, and never thought that the condition was too hard, but only the high price of a valuable possession” (17) .
In 1886, desire for education and need of work intensify his fight for social ascendancy when he enters the High School of Little Rock. He saves his entire “earnings on the ferry”, amounting “about forty dollars in a savings bank”, with which “three more years of schooling were assured” (18) . He measures this financial and educational achievement: “I plunged into that High School work with a zest such as I have seldom experienced since” (18) . Discipline and diligence in both schooling and work help him not only succeed in both areas, but also excel his peers. In the High School, he neutralizes the other students’ rivalry by intensifying his dedication to the studies, culminating in the conquest of his colleagues’ admiration, love and appreciation. He expresses their acceptance: “in conquering their admiration I did not lose their love. I had played fair, and they were not slow to appreciate the fact” (19) .
At the end of the High School, his intellectual exuberance and mastery of Latin and Virgil’s ‘Aineid’ are recognized in the local newspaper’s “statement that the reporter found a Negro boy that possessed the language of the Romans although he had the color of Erebus” (23) . Washington, however, is critical of the study of the classical languages, and shows restriction to the black American’s mastery of Greek and Latin when this learning is not associated with access to industrial education. He criticizes the general feeling, among the Negroes, “that a knowledge, however little, of the Greek and Latin languages would make one a very superior being, something bordering almost on the supernatural” (40) . He suggests that, due to his humble condition, the Negro may profit “from the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and securing property” (42) . Pickens graduates from the High School as the valedictorian of his class and delivers a forty-five minutes long address. His comment on this new achievement reflects his commitment to personal success and progression in work and education. He declares: “the summer immediately following my High School graduation wrote into the story of my life another of those delicious chapters of hard and profitable experience to which I turn and read whenever I am tempted by discouragement” (24) .
Pickens’s move to Talladega College calls attention to the important role that education and work jointly play in his life. He writes a letter to the College and, while he waits for the reply, he starts working in the building of the new railroad, “in the hope of earning an acceptable amount of cash” (27) to fund his future studies at Talladega College. The job is hard and he usually feels so tired that he is unable to read after the work shift. He can only manage to read books, on Sundays, on being Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while the other men gamble and carouse. The description he makes of his endurance of the hard job in the railroad is impressive: “my better habits soon gave me superior strength and endurance and I could tire the toughest rival. This seemed wonderful to the men. They seemed to think that I was a strange fellow. They did not reckon on the habits of life” (28) . He, later, has two happy moments. One is a letter from Talladega College telling him that he “can have some hope” (28) to be accepted as a student. The other is a less hard position in the railroad where he is, later, “put to assist the cook and keeper of the commissary boat” (28) .
When Pickens is decided to travel to Talladega College, despite not having a final acceptance yet, only a vague expectation, he is told by the Congressional Preacher, a friend and advisor, that “if a worthy student could deposit thirty of forty dollars with the treasurer” (29) the College could accept him. He takes his fifty dollars savings, takes a train to meet the College president G.W. Andrews who accepts his money, offers him a job and informs him that he “could learn to” “hitch a horse, milk a cow and work a garden” (30) . Believing that Pickens’s experience would be useful for the other students, the president tells his story in the chapel. Pickens writes that Mr. Andrews is impressed by by the hard life of work and education he is living, and tells

A story to the assembled students, how a young man had written form a distant state; how the correspondence had been lost and forgotten; how the fellow had based his hope on a rather indefinite proposition, had worked hard all summer to earn a few dollars, had come many miles. He described the coolness with which this young man had faced him and his own shifting emotions between the words ”three” and “ten” (30) .

Pickens easily passes the entrance examination and finds a job in the college library. Between work and studies, he “won the college oratorical contest and several
other literary prizes” (32) . The contests make him well known as a good orator and writer. Public speech places Pickens and Washington side by side. Oratory plays an instrumental role in Washington’s life, helping him “do something to make the world better, and then to be able to speak to the world about that thing” (35) . With such an intention Washington diligently follows Miss Nathalie Lord’s lessons on oratory. She teaches him “private lessons in the matter of breathing, emphasis, and articulation” (35) , thus improving his inclination to public speech. He applies the knowledge in the meetings of the societies that he organizes for debate and practice of public speaking. After he makes success among blacks and whites with his Atlanta Address, pedagogical ideas, and beliefs he refuses to “place my services” (103) elsewhere. “My life-work”, he would say, “was at Tuskegee” and “in the interests of Tuskegee and my race” (103) . Like Washington’s speech, Pickens’s oratory is used in the benefit of his own improvement and of the education of his own race. The college makes him a member of ‘a party of four other students and a teacher on a campaign in the financial interest of the college” (32) . Pickens becomes responsible for the address during the campaign in the North. His speech is well accepted, printed in pamphlet, sold, and sent to Dr. G.W. Andrews. This trip to the North impresses him for two different reasons: first, he gets surprised with “the unselfish spirit of the Christian people of the North” (33) ; second, he gets worried about the “very inadequate idea of the real capacity of the American Negro” (33) . The Northerners show surprise that the Negro can sing, speak and behave well. He has a positive evaluation of the campaign, despite the Northerners’ curiosity towards him, and the small sum of money made. Its highest point to him seems to be his visit to Yale, as he writes that “moreover I had seen Yale, had actually looked upon its elms, its ivies and its outer walls. From that day the audacious idea began to take me that I must push my educational battles into its gates” (33) .
Back in Talladega Pickens meets Booker T. Washington in their way to Springfield for the annual meeting of the American Missionary Association in which both deliver speeches. The encounter is cordial and kind, and Washington treats him “with such kindly consideration that I was asked by passengers if I was not Mr. Washington’s son” (32) . Pickens feels happy with the audience’s response to his speech on Negro Education, writing, “I have never had a more thrilling experience or a more appreciative audience that the one in the Court Square Theater” (35) . After this success he gets interested in the educational situation of the Negro population of



the South. Through an institution sponsored by the Talladega College he works in the summer school in a rural community. He notices that almost nothing is done by the state for the public education of this black community. He expresses cordial sympathy for this community who is denied the elements of basic education writing “I was impressed by the humanity, the simplicity and the universal peacefulness of American black folk” (35) .
When he finishes Talladega the dual problem of education and work remains because he intends to go on with his schooling at Yale. He works for the Poles in Chicago and makes his acceptance among them more bearable with his knowledge of German and Latin. As an iron worker he makes money for his future education at Yale and develops “superior Physical strength, which is a good par of any preparation for College” (35/6) . At night he adds intellectual training to physical work, reading “Carlyle and Emerson, latin and German, in anticipation of work at Yale” (36) . He funds his first year at Yale working in a roof garden and restaurant. Later he starts receiving checks of from people, and feels much less anxious. Due to his intellectual quality and discipline he is as an excellent student and is awarded free tuition. During the following years at Yale, Pickens manages to keep his Grade A and never has to pay tuition. He participates in the Ten Eyck Prize in oratory with a very high goal. “I decided to win the first prize,” he writes, “it is a bold thing to acknowledge, but such was my decision” (38) . He leaves his job when he is classified among the ten finalists. His determination to win this new challenge is the same one he applied to mastering any other lesson. After delivering his victorious speech about Hayti he writes “my ambition to win was stimulated by a desire to further the acquaintance of other people with my race” (39) . The idea of calling attention to the Negro’s intellectual ability is repeated when he makes clear that “I would succeed in order to cause others to expect more of the American Negro” (39) .
After graduation from Yale Pickens rejects propositions to work as a professional lecture and, like Washington, he dedicates himself to the education of the race in the South. Pickens returns to Talladega College to work as a teacher of languages for “the work of education seemed to offer a greater field of usefulness to a Negro than any other profession” (42) . His own life and struggle for education in the South is a clear example of the thought of the region. The South “is big with the destiny of the American Negro, and therefore with the future of the Negro race in the whole world” (42) .
Pickens’s life associates personal struggle for the improvement of the race with familial ties. He closes The Heir of Slaves mentioning his marriage to Miss Minnie Cooper McAlpine and their three children, with a thought of his uplifting experiences. He writes

To advance your life is but to push forward the front of your battle to find the same inspiriting struggle still. Oh, the blessing of a boyhood that trains to endurance and struggle! To do the best one can, wherever placed, is a summary of all the rules of success (43) .

If Pickens’s “boyhood that trains to endurance and struggle,” (43) later successful life, and dedication to the race mirror in many aspects the experience of Washington, experts see reasons for the similiarities between these two black Americans. For instance, Andrews understands the ties linking these two lives evidencing Washington’s solid leadership for the Southern black race, and a model for Pickens, and his generation of gifted Negroes. Andrews explains

A young man like William Pickens, who had been born in the South under circumstances similar to those of Washington’s early life, who had likewise pulled himself up by his own bootstraps to attain his ideal of an education, and who had chosen to devote himself to the uplift of his people in a college in the Tuskegeean’s home state, could not help but evoke comparisons to the most famous black man of his time (xix).

Pickens’s Bursting Bonds, the second part of his autobiography, challenges both the picture he portrays of himself in The Heir of Slaves, and association with Washington’s life and educational program for the Negro. Avery argues that Pickens’s distancing and separation from the Washingtonean model derives from a discomfort with the limitations that he envisions in Washington’s instructional practice for the black Americans. Avery refers specifically to Pickens’s feeling that behind the idea of vocational educational and manual training lies his conviction that

“Washington was willing to accept temporary second citizenship and social segregation for his race if, in exchange, they could enjoy greater educational and economic opportunities” (15). Pickens reacts against any “temporary second citizenship and social segregation” for the race arguing that the Negro’s full citizenship and humanity should prevail over his instrumental usefulness and economic wealth within a capitalist society. He believes that “at any rate a man should be a man before he is a piece in the world’s machinery” (173). Thus, disappointment with Washington’s educational weaknesses debasing the Negro as “a piece in the world’s machinery” (173)

forces Pickens to look for an alternate form of militancy, which he finds in Du Bois’s commitment with higher education and political rights for the Southern black Americans.
Bursting Bonds portrays Pickens’s alliance to Du Bois’s struggle for higher education and full citizenship for Southern Negroes. Pickens spends his life pursuing higher education and humanity, from his high school in Little Rock to college at Yale, and decides to be a teacher in Talladega College where he teaches the young black Americans to think for themselves as he himself learnt to do through self-education. He explains

Life forced upon me, or developed within me, the habit of thinking for myself, so that I have never been afraid to stand alone, - too little afraid perhaps. I have never had a disposition to imitate any authority, either in writing an essay, making a speech, getting a lesson into a pupil, - or sketching an autobiography (52).

As an affirmation of self-reliance and independence this statement expresses his which to minimize the potential presence of Washington in his autobiographical text and mitigate the possible comparisons with the Tuskegeean. Furthermore such a statement of self-affirmation is exercised in many other circumstances of his private and public life, at Talladega College and in his travels.
Mirroring “that higher individualism which the center of culture protect” (113) and Du Bois validates, Pickens’s independent attitude helps him analyze power relationships in Talladega College. He criticizes the white teachers’ behavior in the College, denouncing that “a few came principally to spend the winter in a warmer climate” (48). Another criticism refers to how power’s distribution systematically contemplates the whites and makes them “occupy the highest places, regardless of other qualifications” (48). Besides the white teachers the black students are also the object of his attitude and independence. His deep concerns with the students’ punctuality and discipline make him popular among his students for they see that “right or wrong in fact, I was sincere in purpose” (49). As a result of his sincerity the students confide “in me both his individual and his group difficulties” (49) and seek “my advice in every kind of situation” (49). His self-affirming behavior not only gains the black Americans’ respect, but the white Southern Americans’ gratitude as well, who like him because “he does not try to fool us about his way of thinking. He does not pretend to agree with us, - but he minds his own business” (50).
His free thinking is not only exercised in the teaching of the black students in Talladega College, but occupies his speaking itinerary, among whites and blacks, in churches and religious encounters all over the country. Again, as the focus of his speeches is the Negro problem and education, intellectual coherence and responsibility toward the Negro education link Pickens with Du Bois’s idea that the Negro “must teach himself” (60) in order to furnish “the black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideal of life” (60). The Negro’s search for self-education, Du Bois goes on, puts “human advancement” (110) to work for “the increasing civilization of the Negro” (110) and, as a result, creates the educators “who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of the blacks” (110).
Extracting strength from Du Bois’s ideas, Pickens combines his personal motivation and interest toward the improvement of the Negro race with the Niagara Movement and Du Bois. Pickens’s association with the Niagarans is justified in his description of the members of the group. Like himself, they are “liberal-minded Negro men who in that perilous time dared to have thoughts of their own, and who were foolhardy enough to run the risk of the great crime of being called ‘radicals’” (51), the crime being their struggle for the Negro’s full citizenship. The reaction against his involvement with the ‘radicals’ comes from the controllers of Talladega College, who offer him a higher position and pay in a minor school in another state. Independent as he is Pickens refuses the offer and “taking a choice of my own I began in another college at a lower salary” (51).
Pickens chooses to be the head of the department of Greek and sociology at Wiley University in Texas. While working there he becomes conscious “of the unhappy situation and savage treatment of colored people” in the area. His discomfort is caused by the fact that, though the black Americans greatly outnumber the whites, the cruel treatment dispensed by the white populations to the Negro people occurs in various forms: “Jim Crowism, disenfranchisement, segregation and denial of public accommodation and privilege” (58). In this adverse environment, the black educator’s most urgent and challenging job is to bring the young blacks “to a fair degree of education and culture in the face of a terror which unceasingly denies them the primary recognition and the elemental expression of self-respect” (58). As a result of the Negro’s struggle for self-affirmation, many racist incidents determine the white people’s practice of disenfranchising the race. He narrates two instances. One is an account of a black woman who is not allowed to answer a call because she calls herself Mrs. The other is the story of a boy shot in the legs because the vehicle he is driving barely touches the buggy of a “pund officer”. In regard to these events perpetrated against the Negro people in Marshal, Texas, Pickens’s membership in NAACP can be seen as his recognition of its “aim of bettering the condition of the American Negro” (59). His membership in NAACP deepens his political militancy and strengthens his educational fervor, as he himself acknowledges the ties between the educational and the political in his intellectual experience. He writes

It takes experience to make one understand clearly. I had become a member of this organization when it opened its membership books, and many times from Alabama or Texas I traveled thousands of miles, in painful ‘Jim Crow’ for most of the distance, answering a call to address some great meeting which this new force, known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was staging in the North and East. This I regarded as entirely consistent with the large service which I was privileged to render for the educational interests in which I was employed (59/60).

Pickens sees teaching and militancy as crucial to the Du Boisean intellectual he has become, as he believes that political involvement will enlarge his “relations to the affairs of colored people” (60). He insists that the Southern Negro has to be a political activist if he wishes to deal with racial challenges in which America entraps him, as he himself deals prudently, but firmly, with the white man who owes him some money. The appropriate management with that white man prepares him to lately face firmly the restrictions placed by Jim Crowism against his using the good accommodations of the Pullman car in Arkansas. Pickens risks his life to defend his right to take the seat the ticket he bought guarantees him. He applies an effective strategy as resistance. His initial strategy of total silent resistance to discrimination raises verbal threats against his physical safety from the part of the conductor. Later, he adds firm verbal resistance to his decision, not submitting himself to discriminatory imposition, saying “I am going to stay right here where I am, - and attend to my own business” (68). His fight for self-respect clarifies his political consciousness and demand of civil rights for black Americans. After other threats on his freedom of choosing his own way to travel he finds a moment of recognition near Texas, where he meets “Dink” Jeter, a previous enemy, who now seems to recognize his qualities. For Pickens “this very brutal and very human man, was extravagant in his praises. Nearly a generation before he had used all his demon cunning, endeavoring to catch me off my guard and at least injure me seriously” (72). Things have changed since, and now “Dink” Jeter sees in Pickens “the bes’ boy in the whole word” (72). Pickens extracts a lesson from the hard time he had with that man: “I could never feel hatred or resentment toward the man, and that as I looked back, he seemed to be one of my appointed teachers who trained me in the art of vigilant self-defense” (72).
Later, Pickens’s position as the Dean at Morgan College, in Baltimore, highlights his responsibility towards the Negro Soldiers’ education and political involvement in World War I. He addresses his concerns to the idea that the Negro cannot be positioned in the lowest status of the military career as a private, but should also be allowed to be an officer. He and other black activists advocate “an officers’ training camp for the Negroes” (74), believing that black privates would be better treated under the responsibility of black officers. As he believes, that “would make the United States army much less dangerous for the Negro” (74). With the mobilization of the black American students in large colleges “the wisdom of this training camp was recognized” (74). Pickens’s struggle for a new site for Morgan College, like the training camp for Negro officers, is a new step in the combat against the racial discrimination and segregation of the race. Despite the whites’ reaction to the presence of Negro students in their neighborhood “saying that chicken thieves, criminals and rapists were coming into the neighborhood,” (75) the college is built finally.
Pickens closes his Bursting Bonds with a sense of accomplishment. He has achieved professional and intellectual success, has become the vice-president of Morgan College and has been given the degree of Legum Doctor by Wiley University. Simultaneously, his career as a public speaker is successful all over the country, culminating with his accepting a position as Field Secretary of NAACP. He also recognizes the contribution of his children and wife to his success and closes his autobiography by referring to his house as “the place where we lived a wonderful home for the children and for me. – The world still seems good, not all good, but altogether interesting, and always improving” (76).
As has been demonstrated, Pickens’s intellectual career is molded inside a black community that has been influenced by the quality leadership of both Washington and Du Bois. From the tensions between the instructional alternatives these two leading figures have articulated for the black community Pickens rises as the New Negro who, Avery (1989) remarks, acknowledges “the active role played by the blacks in building America” (40). Pickens makes a strong statement of the aggressive humanhood that motivates the new Negro: he “is resolved to fight and live or die” (239) for the right to “be regarded first as a man” (238). By rejecting the status of “a usable article” (231) defended by Washington, he makes clear that “at any rate a man should be a man before he is a piece in the world’s machinery” (173). Thus, the New Negro’s human status must be seen as one in progress, pursued with combat and aggressiveness because, as he notes, “rights, you must go and get them” (101).
The New Negro’s aggressiveness in the battle for civil rights links Pickens to West’s (1993) intellectual catalyst, and projects a model for the black leadership in the Twenty-first century. Aware of social and economic constraints the catalyst leadership will intermingle “serious strategic and tactical thinking” (69), and action, the necessary elements to put “forward a vision of fundamental social change for all who suffer from socially induced misery” (70). For West, due to the magnitude of the “socially induced misery” (70) that pervades the existence of the twenty-first century Negro, the catalyst’s action cannot be only “rooted in the specificity of African American life and history” (84). The catalyst must equally utilize “the American, European and African elements which shape and mold” (84) him and Black America. West validates “modes of cultural fusion” (84):

The distinctive African American cultural forms such as the black sermonic and prayer styles, gospel, blues and jazz should inspire, but not constrain, future black intellectual production; that is, the process by which they came to be should provide valuable insights, but they should serve as models neither to imitate nor emulate (84).

As both Washington and Du Bois did the catalyst will invest in the mutual cooperation of blacks and whites in the emancipation of the Negro race. He will critically fuse “the Western parent” (85) and “the African one” (85) with the African American in order to construct “a critical negation, wise preservation and insurgent transformation of this black lineage which protects the earth and projects a better world” (85).

References

Andrews, L W. “Introduction”. Bursting Bonds: The Autobiography of a “New Negro”. Ed. William L. Andrews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1991, xi-xxviii.
………. “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865-1920.” Up From Slavery: Authoritative Tex, Contexts and Composition, History, Criticism. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: W.W.Norton & Company. 1996, 249-258.
Avery, S. Up From Washington: William Pickens and the Negro Struggle for Equality, 1900-1954. London: Associated University Press. 1989.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Soul of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1994(1903).
Pickens, W. Bursting Bonds: The Autobiography of a “New Negro”. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1991.
………. The New Negro: His Political, Civil and Mental Status and Related Essays. New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1923.
Washington, B.T. Up From Slavery: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Composition, History, Criticism. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York. W.W.Norton & Company, 1996.
West, C. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge. 1993.
………. Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.