Monday, December 2, 2019

How were the views of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois different?

Both Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) were African American leaders interested in advancing African American rights. Washington, who worked at the Tuskegee Institute, saw the solution to the problem of African American civil rights as a gradual struggle in which African American people would first advance themselves through practical trades. Delivering a speech that became known as the "Atlanta Compromise" in 1895, Washington advanced the idea that African Americans would first become indispensable to the white community through economic clout and only then would advocate for political rights. He thought that African Americans emerging from Reconstruction were not fully ready to embrace political rights or to have elite educations.
Du Bois, the first African American person to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), adamantly opposed the Atlanta Compromise. He felt that African American people should immediately begin to agitate for political rights. He thought that elite, educated African Americans, referred to as "the talented tenth," could help African Americans achieve political rights and full civic participation. He, unlike Washington, believed that African Americans should also receive elite educational opportunities and not just opportunities in practical trades. Only by becoming educated, he believed, could African Americans achieve political and economic parity with whites. 

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