Booker T. Washington And The Failure Of The Niagara Movement

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Du Bois clashed on occasion with Booker T. Washington over appropriate strategies for black advancement, whose strategy of accommodation and emphasis on industrial education for blacks, he rejected. Du Bois, co-founded the Niagara Movement in 1906, a black civil rights organization that insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation. Du Bois activism stood in sharp contrast to the accommodations stance of Booker T. Washington, a black leader of international prominence who supported vocational education for blacks, rather than higher education, and who held that a gradual assumption of economic power was the pathway for blacks to attain the rights of full citizenship. Washington was widely accepted by whites as the principal spokesman for the black community and commanded the …show more content…

However, the practical advantages of the Tuskegee group its influence over the black press, backing by white financiers, Washington’s skills as a tactician coupled with fragmentation within the Niagara movement itself helped bring about the demise of Du Bois group in 1910. Some critics contend that the Niagara’s failure was inevitable because of the overwhelmingly racist beliefs of American society at that time. “The movement’s basic problem,” according to Rudwick, “was the nation’s virulent racism that had catapulted a leader like Washington into power. Even if Du Bois had demonstrated superlative leadership skills, Niagara’s program of uncompromising protest for equal treatment was too far ahead of white public opinion, and this fact damaged the movement’s public

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