What does the difference between DuBois and Washington tell us about the state of African Americans during the late 19th century and early 20th century?

Booker T. Washington was a proponent of separatism—not because he accepted segregation personally, but because he believed that black people's greatest hope for progress lay in self-reliance and in building their own communities using the skills they already had as a result of slavery, such as knowledge of agriculture and certain skills in crafts, like blacksmithing.
In his Cotton States and International Exposition Speech in Atlanta in 1895, often called "The Atlanta Exposition Speech," Washington advocated the notion that black and white people could be "as separate as the fingers on a hand" but no less essential to each other.
The failure of Reconstruction, as a result of Southern resistance to black progress as well as the capitulation of Northern politicians and the Hayes administration, which had agreed to end Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877, meant that the sustainability of black communities rested, in Washington's view, on not upsetting white people and demanding just enough to survive. He dissuaded the pursuits of political power and social change. He also did not see the purpose of liberal arts education or intellectual ambitions for black people.
W.E.B. DuBois had the opposite view. He was a strong advocate of intellectual pursuits, though he understood that not all black people would have access to higher education. While still at Harvard, he started developing the idea of a Talented Tenth—a group of relatively privileged, middle-class black people with access to education, who would guide their less advantaged peers to progress.
DuBois was also politically active and helped to start the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and, with the publication of his magazine, Crisis, he promoted the discussion of issues relevant to the black community.
Washington and DuBois represent the two paths that black people could have possibly taken after emancipation and the failure of Reconstruction: separatist self-sufficiency in the form of manual labor or rigorous social, political, and intellectual engagement. Both sought equality. Washington's method was indirect, while DuBois's was direct.