During the years 1890-1920, thousands of black people were lynched and tortured. Restrictive racial laws dismantling the last vestiges of Reconstruction were triumphant, and the authority of governmental, executive, legislative, and judicial offices was aimed at crushing evidence of the black population's resistance to oppression. Concurrent with this harsh environment the United States was beginning to emerge as an important industrial nation. There was an increasing flow of black people to the cities while simultaneously the rural South appeared to be on the verge of a major transformation under the influence of the expanding empires of the Northern industrialists. This period was, consequently, an essential formative time for black intellectual thought. During these years black intellectuals began to wrestle with the increasingly entwined problems of racial oppression and the transformation of the black population from the rural to the urban. The outlines of 20th century Afro-American thought were laid down during these years as the intellectuals made heroic efforts to interpret racism and urbanization in such a way as to advance the race. My argument is that these interpretations took the form of a major debate revolving around the term culture. A materialistic perspective, which emphasized the significance of economic development and downgraded culture as superficial intellectual/artistic activity, was pursued by Booker T. Washington, his Tuskeegee supporters, and by black socialists such as Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph. Concomitantly, an idealistic perspective emphasizing the intellectual, moral, and even spiritual superiority of cultured thought over the deadening effects of capitalism was pronounced by W.E.B. DuBois. A more hesitant line of thought, hinted at by Arthur Schomburg and others, suggested a possible combination of these two major perspectives. My aim, in this paper, is to analyze this important controversy among black intellectuals.