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

Introduction

Past two decades, the 19th century experienced an explosion in black newspapers across the country. More than 500 came between 1880 and 1890. In 1902 alone, 101 black newspapers have begun. In addition, during the two decades from 1895-1915, over 1200 black newspaper serving the African-Americans across the country.

Discussion

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915), born into slavery in southwestern Virginia, became the most widely known African American leader and educator of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The founder and president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he advocated racial uplift through material improvement rooted in practical skills and individual industry.

Contributions of Booker T. Washington

At the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1895, the opportunity to address a national audience catapulted Washington toward his status as the most powerful African American leader of his era. His theme of a route to Black material progress that was not dependent on acquiring social or political equality met great approval from his largely White audience and from conservative African Americans. It created a schism, however, with those African Americans, especially in the Northeast, who viewed him as accommodating White power and prejudices responsible for the injustices of the age of Jim Crow. Washington's most eloquent Black critic, the Harvard University-educated W. E. B. Du Bois, telegrammed his congratulations after the Atlanta speech. But Du Bois later recoiled from Washington's conservative educational concepts and insisted that racial justice required educating Blacks for political and intellectual leadership in the same manner and subjects that dominated White higher education.

Controversy surrounding Washington also concerned his use of presidential power on campus at Tuskegee at the expense of academic freedom and his use of political power in furthering his leadership of African American causes. Nevertheless, his image as a successful educator, ...