Du Bois rejected uplift suasion and elite-gains measures of racial progress

Evidence

Civil rights activists waging sit-ins were hardly waiting on White saviors. Then again, many of these students were expecting their noble campaigns of nonviolent resistance to touch the moral conscience of White Americans, who in turn would save southern Blacks from segregationist policies. That strategy sapped W. E. B. Du Bois’s pleasure with the civil rights movement. And activists desegregating southern businesses that low-income Blacks could hardly afford did not seem like racial progress to Du Bois, who refused to measure racial progress by the gains of Black elites. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 944

Categorization

• XREF: Poignant counterpoint to the Harper Lee assimilationism in the prior paragraph — Du Bois names the exact mechanism behind the Mockingbird critique.