Web Dubois
Essay Preview: Web Dubois
Report this essay
Two great leaders of the African American community in the late 19th and early 20th century were W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. They disagreed on strategies for African American social and economic progress in the face of prejudice, poverty, and segregation:
Booker T. Washington, a former slave and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, believed that African Americans needed to accept segregation and discrimination for the time being and concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity. The eventual acquisition of wealth and culture by African Americans would gradually win for them the respect and acceptance of the white community. This would break down the divisions between the two races and lead to equal citizenship for African Americans in the end. Also he urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity. He believed in education in the crafts, industrial and farming skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift. This, he said, would win the respect of whites and lead to African Americans being fully accepted as citizens and included into all strata of society. Washington wanted blacks in the south to respect and value the need for industrial education both from a vantage of American and African experience. He was against the notion of education as a tool used merely to enable one to speak and write the English language correctly; he wanted school to be a place where one might learn to make life more endurable, and if possible, attractive, he wanted an education that would relieve him of the hard times at home, right away.
Booker T. Washington, early in his life noticed that those who were considered educated were not that far removed from the conditions in which he was residing. Therefore, he disagreed with the post-emancipation ideologies of blacks who believed that freedom from slavery brought freedom from hard work. In addition, education of the head would bring even more sweeping emancipation from work with the hands. He did not want his black people to be ashamed of using their hands, but to have respect for creating something and a sense of satisfaction upon completion of that task. His feeling was that black Americans had to rise up out of oppression by self-improvement. He believed that Black people could not survive without the help of the white American.
This belief included that the best thing for the black American to do was to learn and develop a skill for example, carpentry. These skills would transpire into a more prominent future, thus a rise in the economic ladder or social status. Washington believed that African Americans should seek a primary education, which would both supplement work and life preparation, such as: hygiene and good manners. This belief summed up in a single sentence is that through hard work, thrift, and self-help, blacks would improve their social status and would ultimately win the acceptance of whites. 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