Militant Black opposition to Washington predated and outflanked Du Bois’s critique.

Evidence

Trotter and George Forbes, graduates of Harvard and Amherst, respectively, in 1895, began the publication of the Boston Guardian in order to express their opposition to Booker T. Washington. This was in 1901, two years before Du Bois published his first public criticisms of Washington in his The Souls of Black Folk. Trotter and Forbes, along with their fellow Bostonians, Archibald Grimké and Clement Morgan, established a formidable opposition to Washington, while in Chicago, the lawyers Ferdinand Barnett and E. H. Morris, and in Philadelphia, the physician Dr. N. F. Mossell, organized groups critical of the Tuskegee program in their communities. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2187

Categorization

• QUESTION: Du Bois appears to have back-dated his own role in founding the Niagara movement; worth verifying the standard historical account of who initiated the opposition to Washington.