The "false positions" educational debates between Frederick Douglass and Dr. James McCune Smith in 1853--described below--pitting the education of the hands, versus that of the heads, that has since strained so many nerves and that has displaced so much energy into the 21st century; and that has been carried on under various guises like "busing & integration," versus the "community control of schools," was an early historical predecessor to the later, more infamous Booker T. Washington, versus W.E.B. Dubois "false positions'"controversy, between "hands and heads."
Even more so, was their iconic dispute vehemently expressed in the intellectual war that was waged between various proponents of Marcus Garvey 's Universal Negro Improvement Association versus various personages from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from Dubois to James Weldon Johnson to Walter White and Roy Wilkins, which has yet to abate!
They were all based upon the much earlier 'false-position mathematics' that is rooted in an ancient African methodology, that is based on trial and error, duplation and mediation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication
In THE WORKS OF JAMES McCUNE SMITH : BLACK INTELLECTUAL AND ABOLITIONIST, the Editor, John Stauffer (2007), writes:
"In 'The Inventor,' McCune Smith places enormous weight on the love of craft and craftsmanship as the means to elevate the race and breakdown hierarchies. The very fact that whites felt threatened by skilled black laborers, and closed their workshops to them, was a sign of partial victory: whites feared that blacks would be better craftsmen, and 'it is our business to confirm their fears.' McCune Smith offers as an example of an Alabama slave who proved himself to be the best mechanic in the state. With so much show of 'mechanical genius in a slave state,' blacks would dominate the skilled labor market in a free state if they became 'hand workers.'
"'The Inventor' is partly a response to an essay by Frederick Douglass, who argued that manual labor kept blacks degraded. McCune Smith understood that what the Greeks called 'hand workers' required enormous intellectual skill and energy. There was little difference between an artist and an artisan, a writer and a barber, a physician and a carpenter... Although he does not explicitly say it, McCune Smith implies that the skilled laborer is more effective than the man of wealth for achieving moral uplift and self-understanding and for fighting the debilitating effects of racism."
P.216.
