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Booker T. Washington's Argumentative Essay

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Booker T. Washington's Argumentative Essay
In the age of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” program, Americans viewed formal education as a road to equality amongst social groups, and many of the immigrants and their descendants eagerly embraced schooling as a means of upward mobility. Even though this theory was the farthest thing away from the truth, these schools were separated and grouped children according to their culture, religion, and class as well as skin color. These schools were established by reformers and missionaries who mostly focused on the teaching of practical trades to students. Such schools as the Carlisle Indian School, where boys learned to make harnesses, tin pots and pans, wagons, and carriages, among other products, many of which were sold to local …show more content…
Washington had worked in West Virginia Coal mines before attending Hampton Normal School and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. In 1881 he assumed the leadership of Tuskegee Institute, an Alabama school for blacks founded on the Hampton model. Washington spoke at many rally’s and conventions one of his most significant appearance was at the Cotton States Exposition, a fair held in Atlanta in 1895, where he urged southern black to “Cast down your buckets where you are –in other words to remain in the south and to concentrate on manual skills that would bring a measure of self-supporting to black families. Although this was not the solution to the racial discrimination blacks were experience, Washington saw it as a way of moving upward on the ladder in society. I opposition W E B Du Bois was inferior to the fact that Washington had made such great efforts towards the new evolving blacks with equality and educational rights, suddenly things turned into a downward spiraling effect. Washington tried to persuade his followers to let go of the fuss about voting rights, civic equality and the education. Challenging Washington’s message the northern scholar-activist disagreed with the notions that blacks conform and occupy certain second hand citizen jobs such as maids, carpenters, and sharecroppers. In that same address Washington tried to persuade the whites to refrain from the attacks of innocent men, women, and children. Most whites hailed …show more content…
While it was the entire nation that set the stage for this issue years before the Civil War, Du Bois explains that none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. Everyone is born to be a free man and no person deserves to be called second class citizen just based on the color of his/her skin, class, and etc. Washington’s program in my opinion was not to keep the Negro race down under any other race, but it was to keep down the fuss that was going on, I feel as though he focused more on keeping the conflict to a minimum, it seemed like the more African Americans pushed for civil rights the more that the other races deviated from it. They were prone to attacking and lynching and many other brutal unlawful

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