Uplift suasion fails and converts to militant protest when persuasion proves futile

Evidence

Du Bois’s own false 1901 construction of antiracists as being filled with revenge and anger against White people—instead of anger against racist ideas and discrimination—had finally come back to bite him. He had spent his early years urging Black people to calmly focus their efforts on their own moral uplift, on uplift suasion, to change racist minds. He had tried to provide White Americans with the scientific facts of racial disparities, and he had believed that producers of racist ideas and policies could be persuaded through reason to end their production. He had spent his early years ridiculing leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner as unwise, as violent, and as prejudiced when they had passionately called on Black people to fight. But every year, as the failures of education and persuasion and uplift piled up, Du Bois’s urgings for Black people to protest and fight became stronger and more passionate. But then, he had to face the same criticism and censorship that he had dished out to others earlier in his career. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 819

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the reader’s key takeaway structure: even the great Du Bois lived in assimilationism (uplift suasion) for decades before the evidence pushed him toward antiracist protest — a biographical case for testing Kendi’s three-way scheme.
• SEED: Angle: Du Bois’s own career as the empirical test of the ignorance→hate→discrimination reversal — when persuasion and fact-giving failed repeatedly, the facts never changed policy, only protest did.