Booker T. Washington Versus W. E. B. DuboiseEssay Preview: Booker T. Washington Versus W. E. B. DuboiseReport this essayBooker T. Washington believed that blacks should not push to attain equal civil and political rights with whites. That it was best to concentrate on improving their economic skills and the quality of their character. The burden of improvement resting squarely on the shoulders of the black man. Eventually they would earn the respect and love of the white man, and civil and political rights would be accrued as a matter of course. This was a very non-threatening and popular idea with a lot of whites.
. For two decades Washington established a dominant tone of gradualism and accommodationism among blacks, only to find in the latter half of this period that the leadership was passing to more militant leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois
During the four decades following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen for full citizenship rights were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Courts decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites–totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
Between the Compromise of 1877 and the Compromise of 1895, the problem facing Negro leadership was clear: how to obtain first-class citizenship for the Negro American. How to reach this goal caused considerable debate among Negro leaders. Some advocated physical violence to force concessions from the whites. A few urged Negroes to return to Africa. The majority, however, suggested that Negroes use peaceful, democratic means to change undesirable conditions. Some black leaders encouraged Negroes to become skilled workers, hoping that if they became indispensable to the prosperity of the South, political and social rights would be granted to them. Others advocated struggle for civil rights, specifically the right to vote, on the theory that economic and social rights would follow. Most agreed that solutions would come gradually.
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.
Washington learned the doctrine of economic advancement combined with acceptance of disfranchisement and conciliation with the white South from Armstrong.
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
Washington is remembered chiefly for this “Atlanta Compromise” address. In this speech, he called on white America to provide jobs and industrial-agricultural education for Negroes. In exchange, blacks would give up demands for social equality and civil rights. His message to the Negro was that political and social equality was less important as immediate goals than economic respectability and independence.
Washington believed that if blacks gained an economic foothold, and proved themselves useful to whites, then civil rights and social equality would eventually be given to them. Blacks were urged to work as farmers, skilled artisans, domestic servants, and manual laborers to prove to whites that all blacks were not “liars and chicken thieves.”
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 supremacy. He stressed the mutual interdependence of blacks and whites in the South, but said they were to remain socially separate: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington counseled blacks to remain in the South, obtain a useful education, save their money, work hard, and purchase property. By doing such things, Washington believed, the Negro could ultimately “earn” full citizenship rights.
Several Negro leaders voiced their opposition to Washingtons “Atlanta Compromise” with its admonition to work and wait. They could not topple Washington from power, but one of them did win recognition as a leader of the opposition–W. E. B. DuBois.
DuBois was not an early opponent of Washingtons program. He enthusiastically accepted the Tuskegeeans “Atlanta Compromise” philosophy as sound advice. He said in 1895 that Washingtons speech was “a word fitly spoken.” In fact, during the late 1890s, there were several remarkable similarities in the ideas of the two men, who for a brief period found issues on which they could cooperate. Both Washington and DuBois tended to blame Negroes themselves for their condition. They both placed emphasis on self-help and moral improvement rather than on rights. Both men placed economic advancement before universal manhood suffrage. The professor and the principal were willing to accept franchise restrictions based on education and property qualifications, but not race. Both strongly believed in racial solidarity and economic cooperation, or Black Nationalism. They encouraged the development of Negro business. They agreed that the black masses
are a national burden, and wanted to prevent their progress. A few years after that, the former was given power. For one thing Washington was the best choice of candidates, although of a black character. It seemed like a safe bet that with DuBois’s strong views, the latter was one of the better candidates, especially if African Americans were involved. They also supported “the restoration of the Cherokee as the Cherokee’s rightful successor” in its place. Washington, on the other hand, was the only candidate who had, on average, a decent job and a fair chance of becoming president. However, he did appear to be an extremely uneducated man, who was in his second year as a judge in the U.S.A., and his ability to learn about law and economics was poor. It should be noted that at the time of his election DuBois had made only $12,100, a little less than three percent of the total money his school had spent on its Black College, in Montgomery. He had a degree in finance and, while not a college student, had a bachelor’s of finance. DuBois had much less education than his schoolmates, and many of them were unwell. Washington’s education began with a single high school at Tuskegee, followed by several colleges in Alabama and Mississippi. He continued on to college in Mississippi, Mississippi State, Alabama, Mississippi, Mississippi, Alabama, Mississippi, etc., among other places and places he passed by. After a brief period in Arkansas, he returned to Mississippi State University. His school also included at least three universities that DuBois took seriously. Alabama, for instance, was located just outside the capital. This is the state where it was first established: Alabama has since then become the largest state in the Union, and in 1842 Mississippi was named for the state’s founder, George B. Jackson, who founded and organized a government. Some historians place Mississippi in the second-largest state in the United States when the slave trade was first beginning. DuBois had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1922. He received a master’s degree in economics from the University of Missouri at Mankato in 1925, and a Ph.D.- in political science from the University of Southern California in 1928. He received both a doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1923 and a law degree from the University of Minnesota in 1924. But for all these reasons, he was often regarded by some among historians as a weak candidate. DuBlois would do well to examine his early racial background, and it would be best to keep that in mind when he spoke of the race of Jefferson Davis and the Alabama and Mississippi senators. Davis was a man of very mixed blood. DuBlois believed in the black race. He was a Methodist who, according to some, was highly intelligent, however, he was far from qualified to be president in the United States. According to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his race was “racialized.” The statute did not apply to blacks, but to whites at that time. DuBlois’s racial profile would show, he was clearly more an atheist, less a Catholic. DuBlois received a degree in economics from Yale and a PhD in sociology from Harvard. He would write a number of letters in the South in his junior year of high school, and soon enough DuBois made his own money. He was a man of very mixed blood, his wife had just received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Yale. He was also an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. His family was a small town in which DuBlois went to his second grade school and one day he got a job at the Minneapolis office of DuBois Inc., which was