WEB DuBois V. Booker T. Washington

WEB DuBois V. Booker T. Washington



WEB DuBois V. Booker T. Washington

Introduction

The life of an African-American in the late 1800s and early 1900s was one of poverty without education or equality. After the Civil War ended, the South was war-torn and impoverished and under Reconstruction. Almost all whites in that region held prejudice and racist views towards blacks and did not want them as equals in society. Legally, blacks were “equal citizens,” but socially they were far from it. It is a reach to even call African-Americans during the Reconstruction era citizens. They were primarily treated as second-class beings who happened to live on the same land and breathe the same air as their white counterparts. Many blacks were fighting to simply stay alive, not to get civil rights and equality. For many, simply ridding themselves of slavery was enough, but others wanted more. Two of these forward-looking men were Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. These two dissimilar men held extremely distinct and different viewpoints in regard to how to enhance the black economy, gain black equality, and rid themselves of their dependence on whites.

Analysis

Negro leadership near the turn of the century was divided between these two tactics for racial equality, which may be termed the economic strategy and the political strategy. The most heated controversy in Negro leadership at this time raged between two remarkable black men—Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. The major spokesman for the gradualist economic strategy was Washington. DuBois was the primary advocate of the gradualist political strategy (Weisberger, Bernard A, 1972).

Booker T. Washington emerged in the midst of worsening social, political, and economic conditions for American blacks. His racial program set the terms for the debate on Negro programs for the decades between 1895 and 1915. Born a slave in a Virginia log cabin in 1856, Booker T. Washington was founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute, a normal and industrial school in Alabama. Washington had worked his way through Hampton Institute in Virginia (Walden, Daniel, 1972). General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the principal of Hampton, had established a program of agricultural and industrial training and Christian piety for Negroes acceptable to southern whites. Washington learned the doctrine of economic advancement combined with acceptance of disfranchisement and conciliation with the white South from Armstrong. Washington taught at Hampton until 1881, when he was chosen to head a new school at Tuskegee. His rise to national prominence came in 1895 with a brief speech which outlined his social philosophy and racial strategy. Washington was invited to speak before an integrated audience at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta in September, 1895. He was the first Negro ever to address such a large group of southern whites (Thornbrough, 1969).

The philosophy of Washington was one of accommodation to white oppression. He advised blacks to trust the paternalism of the southern whites and accept the fact of white ...