Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were both early leaders in the struggle for black equality. Washington was probably the preeminent black spokesman at the turn of the century. DuBois was one of the founders of the NAACP. Both agreed that the goal was full participation by blacks in American society, economically and politically. The differences in their backgrounds caused both men to come to different conclusions on how that goal could be reached.

Booker T. Washington was born a slave. Growing up in the South, working to help pay his way through college, teaching black schoolchildren in the South, he was painfully aware of the inequalities that Southern blacks faced on a day-to-day basis. Washington knew that the time for confrontation had not arrived, but also that change was inevitable, that "progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be as the result of severe and constant struggle rather than an artificial forcing" (Washington 5).

The reality of the South, Washington knew, was a system of white-dominated governments, courts, and businesses that kept blacks in economic slavery. A system that used intimidation, beatings, and the hangman's noose, to ensure that blacks remained second class citizens in their own communities; a system that ensured an economic stranglehold on the development of black businesses. Education, Washington believed, was the key to breaking that stranglehold; but not just the education of blacks, but the education of whites as well.

Blacks needed to remember that most of them were going to have to earn a living "by the production of our hands." That there was "as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem." and that no where except in the South is "the Negro given a man's chance in the commercial world" (4 and 5). Because of the size of the black population in the South, whites would eventually have to recognize blacks as their equals.

Whites had to realize that efforts to "curtail the fullest growth of the Negro" would only result in harm. Negroes would be "one third and more of the ignorance and crime… or one third of its intelligence and progress," he cautioned in a speech at the Atlanta Exposition (4). Both races needed to pursue policies that would result in "a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of the law" (4 and 5).