Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois PDF

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Mandatory assignment to get a good grade in the course...

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Nicholas Nerys Premisler Compare and Contrast Booker T. Washington -Booker T. Washington was raised by his slave mother. He was always determined in education and becoming smarter as a child growing up. He attended Hampton University after he gained his freedoms from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He became a professor at one of the most prestigious African American schools during this time, the Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. He believed all African Americans shouldn’t be ashamed of themselves, but to learn and discover what they’re capable of through education. Booker T. Washington believed that the way to gain equality was through education. If the Blacks were educated, hard workers they would reach their goals. He had seen this in his own life and believed that it was true to all. W.E.B. Du Bois -He was the first African American man to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard University, Du Bois' lifetime spanned from Douglass and Washington's to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King's. He believed that education was much more than industrial training and strongly advocated for equal rights. Du Bois was a fan of a classical education and condemned Washington's suggestion that blacks focus only on vocational skills. Without an educated class of leadership, whatever gains were made by blacks could be stripped away by legal loopholes. He believed that every class of people in history had a “Talented Tenth”. The majority of blacks would rely on their guidance to improve their status in society. Political and social equality must come first before blacks could hope to have their fair share of the economic pie. He vociferously attacked the Jim Crow laws and practices that inhibited black suffrage. In 1903, he published The Souls of Black Folk, a series of essays assailing Washington's strategy of accommodation.

Similarities/Differences -Dubois believed in political agitation, that you could not have social and economic rights unless you had political rights to defend them. -Washington believed that economic progress was sufficient, and that in other areas (segregation and political repression) blacks could tolerate inequality....