BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND W.E.B. DU BOIS

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND W.E.B. DU BOIS

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the
attribute of the strong." - Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948).

Booker T. Washington
Born: April 5, 1856 - Franklin County, Virginia
Died: November 14, 1915 - Tuskegee, Alabama

Born a slave, he moved with his mother to West Virginia after emancipation. He began working in a salt furnace at 9. He worked his way through the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute as a janitor, graduating in 1875, and returned to teach there in
1879. When the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute was founded in 1881 as a teacher-training school for blacks, Washington was chosen as its first principal. Under his guidance it thrived and grew impressively, eventually changing its name to Tuskegee University.
By the 1890s Washington had become the most prominent black leader in America. In a speech in Atlanta in 1895, he stated his conviction that blacks could best gain equality in America by improving their economic situation through educationparticularly industrial trainingrather than by demanding equal rights. His "Atlanta Compromise" was sharply criticized by other black leadersincluding W. E. B. du Bois, who would become Washington's great intellectual opponentthough many blacks and most whites supported his views.

Works by Booker T. Washington
Up From Slavery (1901)
Tuskegee and Its People (1905)
The Life of Frederick Douglass (1907)
The Story of the Negro (1909)
My Larger Education (1911)

"Few things can help an individual more than to
place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him." - Booker T. Washington, activist (1856-1915)

W.E.B. Du Bois
Born: February 23, 1868 - Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Died: August 27, 1963 - Accra, Ghana

Of African, French, and Dutch ancestry, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. From 1897 to 1910 he taught at Atlanta University. There he devoted himself to sociological investigations of the condition of American blacks, producing 16 research monographs and The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first case study of an American black community.
Works by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Black Reconstruction(1935)
Dusk at Dawn (1940)
Autobiography (1968)

The intolerable racism that continued to oppress African-Americans led Du Bois to support change through agitation and protest, a position that put him at odds with the period's most influential black leader, Booker T. Washington, who favored accepting the status quo while working to win the respect of whites. Du Bois's landmark work The Souls of Black Folk (1903) expressed the view that such a strategy would merely perpetuate oppression. In 1905 he founded the Niagara Movement, which in 1909 merged with the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. From 1910 to 1934 he served as editor of the NAACP's magazine, the Crisis, which he used to encourage the development of black literature and art. At five Pan-African Conferences (1900-27), he called for independence for African colonies. He resigned from the NAACP for ideological reasons and returned to Atlanta University to teach sociology (1934-44), during which time he also edited the Encyclopedia of the Negro. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, the university's "Review of Race and Culture." During this period he also produced two major books: Black Reconstruction(1935), a Marxist interpretation of the post-Civil War era, and Dusk at Dawn (1940), in which he viewed his own career as a case study illuminating the complexity of black-white conflict.

Du Bois later returned to the NAACP (1944-48), but following a second bitter quarrel he severed his connection and thereafter moved steadily leftward politically. He joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he renounced his American citizenship. His Autobiography was published posthumously in 1968.

THE AMERICAN STANDARD
MR.PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:
It would in some measure relieve my embarrassment if I could,even in a slight degree,feel myself worthy of the great honor which you do me today.Why you have called me from the Black Belt of the South,among my humble people,to share in the honors of this occasion,is not for me to explain;and yet it may not be inappropriate for me to suggest that it seems to me that one of the most vital questions that touch our American life,is how to bring
the strong,wealthy,and learned into helpful touch with the poorest,most ignorant,and humble,and at the same time make the one appreciate the vitalizing,strengthening influence of the other.How shall we make the mansions on Yon Beacon Street feel and see the needs of the spirits in the lowest cabin in Alabama cotton fields or Louisiana sugar bottoms?This problem Harvard University is solving,not by bringing it self down,but by bringing the masses up.
If through me,a humble representative,seven millions of my people in the South might be permitted to send a message to Harvard-Harvard that offerd up on death's altar,youngShaw,and Russell,and Lowell and scores of others,that we might have a free and united country-that message would be,"Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain.Tell them that by the way of the shop,the firld,the skilled hand,habits of thrift and economy,by the way of industrial school and college,we are coming.We are crawling up,working up,yea,bursting up.Often through opression,unjust
discrimination,and prejudice,but through them we are comingup,and with proper habits,intelligence,and property,there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress."
If my life in the past has meant anything in the lifting up of my people and the bringing about of better relations between your people and mine,I assure you from this day it will mean doubly more.In the econoimy of God,there is but one standard by which an individual can succeed-there is but one for a race.This country demands that every race measure itself by American standard.By it a race must rise or fall,scceed or fail,and in the last analysis mere sentiment counts for little.During the next half century and more,my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible.We are to be tested in our patience,our forbearance,our preserverance,our power to endure wrong,to withstand temptations,to economize,to acquire and use skill;
our ability to compete,to succeed in commerce,to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance,to be great and not small,learned and yet simple,high and yet the servant of all.This,this is the passport to all that is best in the life of our Republic,and the Negro must possess it,or debarred.While we are thus being tested,I beg of you to remember that wherever our life touches yours,we help or hinder.Wherever yourlife touches ours,you make us stronger or eaker.No members of your race in any part of our country can harm the meanest member of mine,without the prodest and bluest blood in Massachusetts being degraded.When Mississippi commits crime,New England commits crime,and in so much lowers the standard of your civilization.There is no escape-man drags man down or man lifts man up.
In working out our destiny,while the maid burden and center of activity must be with us,we shall need a large measure in the years that are to come as we have in the past,the help,the encouregment,the guidance that the strong can give the weak.Thus helped,we of both races in the Southnsoon shall throw off the shackles of racialo and sectional prejudices and rise as Harvard University has risen and as we all should rise,above the clouds of ignorance,narrowness,and selifshness,into that atmosphere,that pure sunshine,where it will be our highest ambition to serve man,
our brother,regardless of our race or previous condition.
BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON (1859-1915)

Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.~ Pindar