No account of Black history in America is complete without an examination of the rivalry between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, which in the late 19th to early 20th centuries changed the course of the quest for equality in American society, and in the process helped give birth to the modern civil rights movement. Though Washington and Du Bois were born in the same era, both highly accomplished scholars and committed to the cause of civil rights for Black people in America, it was their differences in background and method that would have the greatest impact on the future.
Washington believed Black people should have economic independence
Born into slavery in Virginia in 1856, Washingtonās early life and education did much to influence his later thinking. After the Civil War he worked in a salt mine and as a domestic for a white family and eventually attended the Hampton Institute, one of the first all-Black schools in America. After completing his education, he began teaching, and in 1881 he was selected to head the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, a sort of vocational school that sought to give African Americans the necessary moral instruction and practical work skills to make them successful in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.
Washington believed that it was economic independence and the ability to show themselves as productive members of society that would eventually lead Black people to true equality and that they should for the time being set aside any demands for civil rights. These ideas formed the essence of a speech he delivered to a mixed-race audience at the Cotton State and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. There and elsewhere, his ideas were readily accepted by both Black people who believed in the practical rationality of his approach, and white people who were more than happy to defer any real discussion of social and political equality for Black people to a later date. It was, however, referred to pejoratively as the āAtlanta Compromiseā by its critics. And among them was Du Bois.
Born to a free Black family, Du Bois first experienced bigotry in college
Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to a free Black family in a comparatively integrated community. He attended the local schools and excelled in his studies, eventually graduating as valedictorian of his class. However, when in 1885 he began attending Fisk University in Tennessee, he encountered for the first time the open bigotry and repression of the Jim Crow South, and the experience had a profound impact on his thinking. Du Bois returned to the North to further his education, with nothing less than equal rights for Black Americans being his ultimate goal. When he earned his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1895, he was the first Black man to have done so, and his dissertation, āThe Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638ā1870,ā was one of the first academic works on the subject.
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