Washington Vs Du Bois Analysis

W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were the two dominant Black leaders of American history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both men had the same goals--eradicating racism, segregation, and discrimination against their race. However, the means to achieve such ends were vastly different, thus the paradox of these Promethean figures have been revisited 100 years later as Black people seek to grapple with their ideas even in the midst of a 40-year, largely self-inflicted genocide.

As America crossed into the twenty-first century, race relations between Blacks and Whites are steadily deteriorating. How could this be? After all, we have had over 35 years of civil rights laws passed by Congress including the Voting
What have Black people gained after fifty years of civil rights activism? What have Black people lost from the time wasted marching in the streets and litigating in the courts? How much further socially, politically, economically, intellectually, spiritually, would Blacks have gotten had they marched, shouted, and protested less and studied, self-examined, and self-denied more? Wouldn't the short-term symbolic victories achieved by the NAACP, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X be eclipsed by the growing of their own institutional structures over the long-term? The true substantive benefits achieved of, by and through your own efforts could not be later taken away by legislative fiat. This is the exact dilemma of government dependency Black people are witnessing today regarding affirmative action and welfare benefits. Our leaders are not telling their people--what the government giveth, the government can taketh
E. B. Du Bois was born a free man in the North, of Black, French, Dutch, and American Indian ancestry. "Thank God, no Anglo-Saxon," he often liked to add. However, Du Bois's White pedigree cannot be denied. Educated in the best schools of Europe and the United States, he studied with such great minds as George Santayana and William James. In 1895, he became the first Black person to receive a doctorate degree from Harvard. Interestingly, Du Bois represented a privileged group within the Black community coming from a generation of mixed-blooded mulattoes in the North, whose parents were the first generation to reap the fruits of the abolition of slavery. Such people had gained much more in material benefits in comparison to those ex-slaves from the South, who knew well the strictures the color line had on their lives in preventing them from achieving full citizenship rights.

To Du Bois and his contemporaries, Washington's approach to race relations was viewed as embarrassingly accommodationist to White racism. Du Bois, in many of his writings, like his magnum opus, The Souls of Black Folk, articles in Crisis Magazine, and in numerous speeches, mercilessly ridiculed Washington as the first Uncle Tom, who passively tolerated maltreatment from Whites, in exchange for a pat on the head and the hypocritical embrace of their paternalistic benevolence. Washington's self-help programs of general industrial education was disdained by Du