Compare And Contrast Booker Tus Garvey And W. E. B. Dubois

The writings of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois postulate a formula for the advancement of African Americans. Each formula can be traced to its advocate’s respective life experience. While their individual formulas differ in the initial priorities and the necessary steps described, when viewed collectively as points in a progression, those points at times intersect and then diverge, and at other times they are divergent and then intersect.
Washington and Garvey’s initial priorities of economic improvement were similar, and that similarity is attributable to their relatively comparable upbringings. Both men saw education as a bottom-up process that would lead initially to economic advancements. Washington was born into

The base of the pyramid of progression consists of the oppressed African American population who possessed limited resources economically and educationally, resulting in the limited opportunity to improve their standard of living and to obtain political and civic equality. Washington and Garvey, members of this base level given their similarly oppressed upbringings, began at this first level and addressed the obstacles that they faced during childhood when pressing their priority for economic improvement for African Americans as the principal purpose for education. As Washington summarizes, “success only came from rising up from the bottom according to firm guidelines” (Bieze 16). Garvey and Washington focused on vocational education as the most likely means of achieving economic equality with whites—the next level in the

One anecdotal example is the potential dangers of Garvey’s philosophy illustrated by my K-12 experience. My predominantly white public school district was not influenced by the different experiences of other races. I only received a single story that was a product of my curriculum and my teachers’ education. My understanding of the full and long-term impact of slavery was limited, and my exposure to the suffering of Asian, Mexican, and Native Americans was almost non-existent. Until I reached the upper level classes available to a small number of students, I was entirely unaware of these different experiences, their impact, and how they affect perception and thought. Our basic history class dedicated more time to the history that directly applied to my peers, such as the glory of the Spanish missions and the California Gold Rush. Experiences drive perspective, and because of that, my perspective, along with the perspectives of individuals in Garvey’s uniform society, was (and would be) limited. But perhaps even more important, it is unlikely that I would recognize this if I were unable to understand what drove Garvey’s philosophy, as well as the philosophies of Washington and Du Bois, in the first