Since their arrival in North America, Blacks have been abused and oppressed into a state less than human. In an article written by W.E.B. Du Bois he said, “The sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle God created a tertium quid, and called it a negro” (Du Bois). In the late 19th and 20th centuries a strong push for economic and social progress for African-Americans was being made. The prominent leaders of this movement amongst the Black community were Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, however they had very differing views on how to achieve this goal (PBS.org). Washington and Du Bois essentially split the Black community into two parties, radical and conservative. Du Bois, the radical, preached for a strong political and civil rights agenda, and uplift for Blacks through education. Washington pushed for Blacks to accept their racial discrimination until they had proven themselves through hard work and self help (PBS.org). It is common to refer to knowledge as power; if you prove to someone that you are intellectually equal or superior there, can be no further debate. That is why Du Bois’ push for higher education and political action were the means to equal citizenship for Blacks in a White supremacist America.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1865. Washington experienced first hand the atrocities that African-Americans were facing, living an unimaginable childhood in which he did not own a pair of shoes until the age of eight (Moore 16). After Washington was emancipated from slavery following the Civil War, He went on to receive his education at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. At Hampton, Washington received training in industry and agriculture (Gibson). Washington was a ...
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Gibson, Robert A. "Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Problem of Negro Leadership." 78.02.02: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Problem of Negro Leadership. Yale University, n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. .
Moore, Jack B. W.E.B. Du Bois,. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Print.
Moore, Jacqueline M. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Print.
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Washington, Booker T. "The Awakening of the Negro." The Atlantic Monthly 1 Sept. 1896: n. pag. Web. .
Booker 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.
Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2009. Print.
When it all comes down to it, one of the greatest intellectual battles U.S. history was the legendary disagreement between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. This intellectual debate sparked the interest of the Northerners as well as the racist whites that occupied the south. This debate was simply about how the blacks, who just gained freedom from slavery, should exist in America with the white majority. Even though Washington and DuBois stood on opposite sides of the fence they both agreed on one thing, that it was a time for a change in the treatment of African Americans. I chose his topic to write about because I strongly agree with both of the men’s ideas but there is some things about their views that I don’t agree with. Their ideas and views are the things that will be addressed in this essay.
Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois are both writers who use realism as their literary mode. They both try to depict life the way it was and didn’t “sugar coat” it. They both also wanted more civil rights to be given to the blacks. Although they lived in the same era they had different opinions on how to get these rights. They think differently about education, racial advancement, and relationships between blacks and whites. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois’ ideas are reflected in their different writing styles, and different backgrounds, along with his intentions, becoming important when their differences had one of the greatest impacts on the future.
Lewis’s viewpoint is not without it’s truths. The Harlem renaissance was overseen by a number of intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Dubois. Booker T. Washington‘s, a highly influential speaker of the age, words appealed to both Caucasians and African-Americans. Washington forged an interracial bridge of communication through his unique tactics in the quest for equality. He believed in more subtle ways of gaining equality through hard work, cunning, and humility. He stated, “The wisest among my race understands that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”(Salley, 15) With this statement, Washington himself denies that this new awakening in equality and arts could be forced,...
W.E.B Du Bois strategy can be evaluated as ceaseless agitation as stated in The Niagara Movement "If we expect to gain our rights by nerveless acquiescence in wrong, then we expect to do what no other nation ever did. What must we do then? We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complain, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong- this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it." For this time period, this strategy is inefficient because he only thought about a small percentage of the Black race. As like Washington, he to wanted them to go to top colleges, get a great education, and in some way he thought that they were going to become the intelligence whole Black nation.
Booker T. Washington was an African American leader who established an African-American college in 1181. Then in 1895 delivered the Atlanta Compromise Speech to an audience of mainly Southerners, but some Northerners were present. In his speech he made a few points. He said, “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” Washington believed that the African American race needed to learn first that manual labor was just as important as the work of intellects. He thought that until they learned this they were not worthy of becoming intellects themselves. The color line is thus important in teaching them this lesson. He also said, “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” His opinion was that one day blacks would deserve to have equal rights with the whites, but right now in 1895 the blacks needed to be...
Bibliography:.. 1)http://galenet.gale.com/a/acp/netacgi/nph-brs?d=booker+washington&pgl =FT&1&u-/a/acp//db/dma/&r=3&r=1&u-/a/acp/db/dma 2)Drinker,FredrickE.,Booker T. Washington:The Master Mind of a Child of Slavery, Greemwppd,1970. 3)http://docsouth.unc.edu/washington/about.html 4)Jr. Spencer, Samuel R. Booker T. Washington, And the Negro's Place in American Life, Little, Brown and Company. Boston.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born a slave in Hale’s Ford, Virginia, in 1856. He was forced to labor from a young age and was confused when he saw white children his age sitting
W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were two very influential leaders in the black community during the late 19th century, early 20th century. However, they both had different views on improvement of social and economic standing for blacks. Booker T. Washington, an ex-slave, put into practice his educational ideas at Tuskegee, which opened in 1881. Washington stressed patience, manual training, and hard work. He believed that blacks should go to school, learn skills, and work their way up the ladder. Washington also urged blacks to accept racial discrimination for the time being, and once they worked their way up, they would gain the respect of whites and be fully accepted as citizens. W.E.B. Du Bois on the other hand, wanted a more aggressive strategy. He studied at Fisk University in Tennessee and the University of Berlin before he went on to study at Harvard. He then took a low paying research job at the University of Pennsylvania, using a new discipline of sociology which emphasized factual observation in the field to study the condition of blacks. The first study of the effect of urban life on blacks, it cited a wealth of statistics, all suggesting that crime in the ward stemmed not from inborn degeneracy but from the environment in which blacks lived. Change the environment, and people would change too; education was a good way to go about it. The different strategies offered by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington in dealing with the problems of poverty and discrimination faced by Black Americans were education, developing economic skills, and insisting on things continually such as the right to vote. ...
In Defense of Booker T. Washington Booker T. Washington's legacy is a troubled one. Dubois was right to say, "When Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our higher minds" (afro 1). But can we really fault Booker T. for being misguided and flat-out wrong? Washington is not the first successful, insufferable man in America who rose from abject poverty to a life of bourgeois comfort, who then assumed that everyone else could too, if only they did as he did.
Du Bois was a scholar activist who proposed lots of solutions for the issue of racism and discrimination. Du Bois was sort of an opposition to Washington’s ideology, as he strongly believes that it can only help to disseminate white’s oppression towards blacks. We can see his dissatisfaction based on his writing with a title On Booker T. Washington and Others. He wrote that Washington’s philosophy was really not a good idea because the white extremists from the south will perceived this idea as blacks’ complete surrender for the request of civil rights and political equality. Du Bois had a different view on this issue if compared to Washington because of their different early lifestyles. Unlike Washington, Du Bois was born free in the North and he did not receive any harsh experienced as a slave himself and was also grew up in a predominantly white area. In his writings, it is obvious that he thought that the most important thing that the black should gain was to have the equality with whites. Regarding the issue of the voting rights, Du Bois strongly believed that it is important for black people to agitate to get the right to vote. He also believed that the disfranchisement of poor men could mean the catastrophe of South’s democracy (Painter 157). In his writing with a title Of Our Spiritual Strivings, he wrote that it was significant for blacks to exercise the right to vote because there were whites that wanted to put them back in their inferior position—and it was
The Similarities and Differences of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois’s Views During the late 19th and early 20th century, racial injustice was very prominent and even wildly accepted in the South. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were two of the most renowned “pioneers in the [search] for African-American equality in America” (Washington, DuBois, and the Black Future). Washington was “born a slave” who highly believed in the concept of “separate but equal,” meaning that “we can be as [distant] as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Washington 1042). DuBois was a victim of many “racial problems before his years as a student” and disagreed with Washington’s point of view, which led
In 1903 black leader and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote an essay in his collection The Souls of Black Folk with the title “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” Both Washington and Du Bois were leaders of the black community in the 19th and 20th century, even though they both wanted to see the same outcome for black Americans, they disagreed on strategies to help achieve black social and economic progress. History shows that W.E.B Du Bois was correct in racial equality would only be achieved through politics and higher education of the African American youth.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery in Three Negro Classics, John Hope Franklin, Editor. New York: Avon Books, 1999.