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Compare And Contrast Washington And W. E. B. Dubois

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Compare And Contrast Washington And W. E. B. Dubois
In the years following Reconstruction, many African Americans rose to the challenge of bringing rights and equality to blacks. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ida Wells-Barnett are just of few examples of the outstanding influential African American leaders that had an impact on the people, time period, and history. Booker T. Washington did what seemed like the impossible for blacks; he founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was there that the former slave trained uneducated African American students in a trade that would help them achieve economic freedom and experience the same equality as whites. To achieve this freedom and equality, he taught that if blacks excelled in fields like teaching, agriculture, and manual labor …show more content…
W.E.B. DuBois was the exact opposite of Washington. W.E.B. DuBois was the very first black Ph. D. graduate from Harvard University. DuBois was one of those African Americans that found Washington’s philosophies and teachings controversial, and he disagreed with him on many things. Offended by the ideas that Booker T. expressed in his Atlanta speech, DuBois saw Washington as someone that only wanted to please the white community and population. In response to Washington’s Atlanta speech, DuBois delivered the “Atlanta Compromise.” Within this speech he argued about how the acceptation of segregation and settling for achievement would not get the African American community anywhere. He thought that blacks should go after occupations in humanities and managerial/professional (white collar) fields. It was his thoughts that blacks must be politically, legally, and socially active in order to achieve equality. DuBois helped organize a group of black intellectuals known as the Niagara Movement; it was their goal to outline an agenda for African American progress in the US. In 1909, he was also an important part of the founding of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; they also devoted themselves to the progress of African

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