T. Thomas Fortune is a man of education and ability. As the editor for many years of the leading colored paper in the United States, its columns indicated that he certainly upheld the hands of Dr. Washington. Indeed he did not hesitate to belabor without stint the heads of such colored detractors of Dr. Washington as Monroe Trotter of Boston and others, even administering a rap or two to Professor W. E. Burghardt DuBois, when the latter failed to keep step with the Washington procession. But T. Thomas Fortune was of too independent a nature to be restrained from the expression of his own view, and shortly before his surrender of his position as editor of “The Age”, he published the following declaration: “The question of the right to marry and give in marriage is at the bottom of the whole life of the Republic. The Afro-American who says he does not desire social equality is an unmitigated fool or an outrageous blackguard, who sacrifices what he should know to be a primal right to a subservient purpose.” Can it be believed that a man sufficiently fearless to make this declaration and feeling obliged to do so, would uphold at all times the hands of an unmitigated fool or an outrageous blackguard? It is difficult to believe it. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that while Washington, with “the wisest” of his race understood: “that the agitation of questions of social equality was the extremest folly,” he nevertheless cherished the aspiration. And indeed it would be most unnatural if he did not. Bearing all the possibilities in mind, the question is, however, whether any policy which tends to keep massed in the South so many of the Negroes as are banked there, is to the best interest of the South, or the Nation, or conducive of the greatest good to the greatest number? But Washington did not stand as the unrivalled leader of his race. Two other members of it criticised his leadership with arguments which could not be brushed aside too lightly. The first of these compiled in 1899, what was the most thorough investigation into the conditions enveloping the Negro at the North, which had been printed up to that time. The author of “The Philadelphia Negro” is thus introduced by Dr. A. Bushnell Hart: “The most distinguished literary man of the race W. E. Burghardt DuBois—an A. B. and Ph. D. of Harvard, who studied several years in Germany, and as Professor of Sociology in Atlanta University has had an unusual opportunity to study his people.”[256] Dr. DuBois’s book was an entirely different style of work from the popular “Up from Slavery” published a year or two later, “with the painstaking and generous assistance of Max Bennett Thrasher”, as the autobiography of Washington. DuBois’s book, “The Philadelphia Negro” is a most carefully made sociological investigation. Later in 1903, Dr. DuBois published another volume entitled: “The Souls of Black Folk”—in which after a preface opening with: