W.E.B. Du Bois

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.

Between the years 1860 and 1920, the percentage of 5-19 year old African-Americans enrolled in school went up by 50 percent. That is obviously a significant increase in just 60 years. This shows that leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, advocates for the education of Blacks, worked hard to get African-Americans an education in order to get the respect of whites (Doc. A). In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois openly attacked Booker T. Washington and the philosophy of the Atlanta Compromise. He urged African Americans to aspire to professional careers, to fight for the restoration of their civil rights, and wherever possible, to get a college education. Calling for integrated schools with equal opportunity for all, Du Bois urged blacks to educate their “talented tenth”, a highly trained intellectual elite, to lead them. Between the years or 1890 and 1910, the percentage of African Americans over the age of 9 unable to read went down by 35 percent. This also shows a successful attempt at educating blacks during this time in order to perpetuate white oppression (Doc. B). Du Bois was not alone in promoting careers in the professions. Throughout higher education there was increased emphasis on professional training, particularly in medicine, dentistry, and law. Enrollments swelled, even as standards of admission tightened. The number of medical schools in the country rose from 75 in 1870 to 160 in 1900, and the number of medical students- including more and more women, almost tripled.

In the “Atlanta Compromise Address” in 1895, Booker T. Washington explains that African-Americans need to be prepared when it comes to working industrially. If blacks can be powerful enough to buy surplus land, and run factories, then eventually they will be equal to whites, and be the most patient, law-abiding and unresentful people that the world has seen (Doc. D). Created in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), it swiftly became the most important civil rights organization in the country. The NAACP pressured employers, labor unions, and the government on behalf of African Americans. It had some victories. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court overturned a “grandfather clause” that kept African Americans from voting in Oklahoma. In 1918, in the midst of World War I, the NAACP and the National Urban League persuaded the federal government to form a special Bureau of Negro Economics within the Labor Department to look after the interests of African American wage earners. However, despite these gains, African Americans continued to experience disfranchisement, poor job opportunities, and segregation. T. Thomas Fortune, a Black activist and newspaper editor claims that he visited Tuskegee, and explains what is being taught there and how it is beneficial. He claims that 400 African Americans there are being taught black smithing, wheel-wrighting, carpentering, printing, and building. In other words, African-Americans are being