Ajay Kharkar

Red
The late 1800s and early 1900s were good for African Americans, but at the same time,

very bad. Slavery had been ended earlier, and Reconstruction had African Americans in politics,

working jobs, even having whites working for them. But there was still discrimination

everywhere, and many blacks were not educated. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes,

and court cases such as US vs. Cruikshank and the Slaughterhouse Cases were essentially putting

blacks back down into a lower class. During this time period, two men, both great black leaders,

tried to change this slide back into a second slavery. These men were named Booker T.

Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, both fighting for the same goal, but in opposing ways. Booker

T. Washington, the conservative, wanted there to be equality, but he believed it should be

earned through work, as opposed to the radical DuBois, who believed protests and education

were the ways to racial equality.

Booker T. Washington was considered a great leader, but one who was very calm and not

fiery. This is clear in his ideals of economic independence and that the happiest individuals

are those who do the most to make others useful and happy. He believed that there was only one

way to racial equality, and that was to work just like the white man. In that time period, blacks

had the notion that they were done with slavery, and therefore done with working for people.

This left barely any jobs for them to do, and this is also a reason sharecropping became so

popular. Washington was trying to tell his race that it was not a disgrace to labor, and that they

could become just like the white people if they started laboring and became independent. On

Washingtons speech Up from Slavery, he says the opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just

now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house. He

wanted his people to just work, and believed that was the best way for them to find their way in

life, their manhood (Earl Thorpe, The Mind of the Negro, 330). As great as this system seemed
too many, especially whites, Washington had many critics with many valid points. The main one,

as Ida Wells-Barnett says, is [the Negro] knows by sad experience that industrial education will

not stand him in the place of political, evil and intellectual liberty, and he objects to being

deprived of fundamental rights of American citizenship(World Today, Aril 1904). This means,

in simpler terms, that basically the African Americans knew from their prior experiences that just

working wouldnt get them the equality they needed. Another big problem with Washington's

ideas was the lack of focus on education. In Barnetts article, she says The Board of Education

in New Orleans cut curriculumfor Negro childrengiving Mr. Washingtons theory as an

inspiration for so doing (World Today, Aril 1904). Though it is true that Washingtons theory

could be interpreted as the Negro not needing an education, that was not his views, and he was

just used as an excuse for educators to discriminate more fully. Washington believed if the

government funded schools for basic education and let the Negro own his own land and to work,

equality would be reached very fast.

W.E.B. DuBois had a very different ideology on how to reach racial equality. He

believed that the race was going towards a second slavery because of industrial slavery and

civic death and the only way to save themselves from it was to opposewith all civilized

methodsbecause we have no right to sit silently while the inevitable seeds for a harvest of

disaster. This idea was echoed by many blacks who wanted to improve their status in life, and

who didnt think Washingtons sit back and work would work for them to reach their true

equality that they wanted. DuBois had a few basic issues that he thought were holding to blacks

in a lower class, and preventing equality from becoming real. DuBois says the most important is,

The right to votefull manhood suffrage (Autobiography 249-251). According to DuBois, and

many people, not only in his time period, but still today, this right controlled everything. Dubois
believed it controlled everything from freedom tothe chastity of our daughters. This was the

right that would give blacks true equality, and the right DuBois worked the hardest for. The next

issue he hated, for good reason, was discrimination of public accommodation, which is un-

American and silly (249-251). For obvious reasons, he believed that equality could not be

achieved while discrimination was still obvious in public services. He also wanted the right to

walk, talk and be with them who wish to be with us and laws enforced against rich and poor.

These issues, though different, were both the same problem. The African Americans were treated

as a lower class, and the lower class has fewer privileges than the upper class. Both DuBoiss

and Washingtons ideas were focused on changing that idea and making everybody just one

class. The last issue DuBois needed changed was We want our children educatedreal

education. He wanted black children to be educated just as well as white children, because he

believed that was the only way to go far in life and become an equal to the white man. These

were all of DuBoiss ideals, but what he is known for is his strategies of achieving them. He

protested, he made loud, explosive speeches, and he became a big political figure. As a PBS

article says, The Du Bois philosophy of agitation and protest for civil rights flowed directly into

the Civil Rights movement.

Though these men both were influential in the civil rights movements of the

Reconstruction era, they had opposing if not completely opposite ideas of how to achieve racial

equality. Both had solid ideas on how to raise themselves out of the lower class, but the problems

with ones strategies were the strengths of the others. Washington believed the biggest

impediment to racial equality was the lack of economic independence that his race had. He

believed if that was corrected, independence would simply come to them. DuBois thought that

the biggest impediment to racial equality was the lack of rights and political power that blacks
had. DuBois wanted to just destroy segregation, and force the whites to accept that blacks were

equal citizens. Washington would rather let the blacks work for their equality, and eventually the

whites would recognize that the blacks were equal citizens. Both of these had supporters in the

African American community, and both were tried. But both Washington and DuBois had

problems with their strategies. DuBois wanted full equality, and he wanted it fast. But as

Washington says, Progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be

the result of severe and constant struggle, not artificial forcing (Up from Slavery, 219-224). He

is saying that while they were equal to whites, they had to prove that instead of just forcing it on

them. Washington believed that if equality was earned, it would stay, and if it was just placed in

their hands, it would collapse. But Washingtons plans had more than one flaw as well. He says,

in the same document, We learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill

into the common occupations of life (221-224). This was considered by many too close to the

second slavery DuBois tried his hardest to avoid. This may have been why, when blacks had

finally stopped segregation, for the most part, in the 1960s, they used the Civil Rights

Movement patterns of DuBois instead of Washingtons.

Though they had many disagreements on how to achieve it, racial equality and civil

rights of the Reconstruction era would not have been the same without these two very influential

men. Though segregation continued for another 60 years after these men led their respective

movements, it could have been much worse if they were not there. Blacks got some educations,

due partially to DuBois, and there were many working class blacks who gained respect from

their white neighbors, as Washington had hoped. The political, social, and economic positions

of blacks did start getting better, at least for a short while, due to the movements led by these two

men, very different, but still almost parallel.

 Works Cited

PBS Frontline. PBS, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/

frontline/shows/race/etc/road.html>.