  Contra Washington, Du Bois argued that self-help efforts, while necessary for black social progress, were not sufficient. Assuming that both racial prejudice and cultural backwardness cause Negro problems, Du Bois claims that a self-help politics that attends to the backwardness of the Negro group itself without attacking racial prejudice is doomed to fail. Washington had argued that there was no need to attack prejudice for the present, because self-help efforts that contended with entrepreneurial-economic backwardness (for Du Bois, a form of cultural backwardness) would suffice to defeat it. Du Bois rejects this argument on the grounds that the persistent, prejudice-sustained denial of rights to blacks undermines their self-help efforts and prospects for business success.  Washington’s program amounts to a partial, one-sided attack on the Negro problems. In Du Bois’s view, black uplift and social progress required that black political elites attack both prongs of the Negro problem—racial prejudice no less than backwardness. It also required institutions of higher learning to train these elites. Thus, Du Bois takes Washington to task for promoting an educational philosophy that emphasized vocational education at the expense of higher, liberal arts education (Du Bois, 1903a, chapter 3).