Any topic (writer’s choice)

Any topic (writer’s choice)

Paper instructions:
English is my second language, please do NOT use difficult words and grammar.
please read Carefully my Request and Attachment.

I have attached my Textbook that is called “The African-American Odyssey” PDF, please feel free to use it.  Additionally, “Topic and Reading” doc. is our topic, part of reading, and requests from my professor. Please read it Carefully!!

You can NOT use your reading, whatever from your books or Internet, please ONLY use my reading resources in the attachment.

If you use quotation, or use meaning form resources, please MUST write down the exactly place, where can my professor find it?

Like,”Quotation” (which page, which line or which paragraph). Explain it and express your OWN ideas.

After carefully reading material on Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois contained in Chapter 15 “African Americans Challenge White Supremacy,” Chapter 16 “Conciliation, Agitation and Migration” (Textbook) and the Notes on Washington and Du Bois (This doc.), answer the following in a five page paper.

Please write a full five pages paper, double-spaced, with 1 inch margins top and bottom, left and right, a 12 point typeface and a standard size font such as Times New Roman — in other words a paper which is void of any of the “tricks” to make a short paper look longer than it is.  Quotations should be minimal!! No long block quotations, which are also used to simply take up space.  Paper should basically be your own thoughts, analyzing what you have read!!

Booker T. and W.E.B.
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois
By Dudley Randall

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook,
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.–

“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.
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The following is from PBS Frontline website:

Two great leaders of the black community in the late 19th and 20th century were W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. However, they sharply disagreed on strategies for black social and economic progress. Their opposing philosophies can be found in much of today’s discussions over how to end class and racial injustice, what is the role of black leadership, and what do the ‘haves’ owe the ‘have-nots’ in the black community.
Booker T. Washington, educator, reformer and the most influentional black leader of his time (1856-1915) preached a philosophy of self-help, racial solidarity and accomodation. He urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity. He believed in education in the crafts, industrial and farming skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift. This, he said, would win the respect of whites and lead to African Americans being fully accepted as citizens and integrated into all strata of society.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a towering black intellectual, scholar and political thinker (1868-1963) said no–Washington’s strategy would serve only to perpetuate white oppression. Du Bois advocated political action and a civil rights agenda (he helped found the NAACP). In addition, he argued that social change could be accomplished by developing the small group of college-educated blacks he called “the Talented Tenth:”
“The Negro Race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education then, among Negroes, must first of all deal with the “Talented Tenth.” It is the problem of developing the best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the worst.”
At the time, the Washington/Du Bois dispute polarized African American leaders into two wings–the ‘conservative’ supporters of Washington and his ‘radical’ critics. The Du Bois philosophy of agitation and protest for civil rights flowed directly into the Civil Rights movement which began to develop in the 1950’s and exploded in the 1960’s. Booker T. today is associated, perhaps unfairly, with the self-help/colorblind/Republican/Clarence Thomas/Thomas Sowell wing of the black community and its leaders. The Nation of Islam and Maulana Karenga’s Afrocentrism derive too from this strand out of Booker T.’s philosophy. However, the latter advocated withdrawal from the mainstream in the name of economic advancement.
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1895 was a watershed (major turning point) year in African American history.  First of all, Frederick Douglass died in 1895.  Douglass was the brilliant orator, newspaper publisher and abolitionist (anti-slavery crusader), who had escaped from slavery as a child, taught himself how to read, and risen to prominence as the unrivaled spokesperson and leader of black Americans.  he famously said:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress
Secondly, there was black leadership vacuum because of Douglass’ death.  Thirdly two black men, Booker T. Washington and W.E. B. Du Bois both rose to prominence that year and eventually vied with one another to become the new leader of black America.  The two men had opposing philosophies.
In an period marked by an attempt to place newly emancipated blacks back into a subservient status through segregation, Booker T. Washington seemed to some blacks to be the opposite of the strident Douglass. Washington was seen as an “Uncle Tom” or an accommodationist because he did not struggle against segregation but submitted to it.  In his infamous 1895 Atlanta Convention Speech which derisively became known as the “Atlanta Compromise Speech,” Washington made compromises with the white segregationists, by  advocating that blacks should not fight for civil rights or integration into the higher echelons of society but instead should be content to take menial labor jobs at the bottom of society. Washington argued that blacks  should learn  occupational/ vocational trades (manual labor occupations such as carpentry, bricklaying, farming, etc), and quietly work hard and become an economically self-sufficient (but segregated) community.
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Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute    Home
Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois: The Problem of Negro Leadership
by
Robert A. Gibson
________________________________________
Contents of Curriculum Unit 78.02.02:
•    Narrative
•    Utilization of the Unit
•    Bibliography
•    Student Bibliography
•    Audio-Visual Aids
To Guide Entry
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The problem of Negro leadership during the twenty years between 1895 and 1915 will be covered in this unit of Afro-American History. The issues raised by the celebrated debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois will be its central theme. For two decades Washington established a dominant tone of gradualism and accommodationism among blacks, only to find in the latter half of this period that the leadership was passing to more militant leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois.
During the four decades following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen for full citizenship rights were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the �Negro problem� in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or �second-class� citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court�s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites�totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
Between the Compromise of 1877 and the Compromise of 1895, the problem facing Negro leadership was clear: how to obtain first-class citizenship for the Negro American. How to reach this goal caused considerable debate among Negro leaders. Some advocated physical violence to force concessions from the whites. A few urged Negroes to return to Africa. The majority, however, suggested that Negroes use peaceful, democratic means to change undesirable conditions. Some black leaders encouraged Negroes to become skilled workers, hoping that if they became indispensable to the prosperity of the South, political and social rights would be granted to them. Others advocated struggle for civil rights, specifically the right to vote, on the theory that economic and social rights would follow. Most agreed that solutions would come gradually.
Negro leadership near the turn of the century was divided between these two tactics for racial equality, which may be termed the economic strategy and the political strategy. The most heated controversy in Negro leadership at this time raged between two remarkable black men�Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. The major spokesman for the gradualist economic strategy was Washington. DuBois was the primary advocate of the gradualist political strategy.
Booker T. Washington emerged in the midst of worsening social, political, and economic conditions for American blacks. His racial program set the terms for the debate on Negro programs for the decades between 1895 and 1915. Born a slave in a Virginia log cabin in 1856, Booker T. Washington was founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute, a normal and industrial school in Alabama. Washington had worked his way through Hampton Institute in Virginia. General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the principal of Hampton, had established a program of agricultural and industrial training and Christian piety for Negroes acceptable to southern whites. Washington learned the doctrine of economic advancement combined with acceptance of disfranchisement and conciliation with the white South from Armstrong. Washington taught at Hampton until 1881, when he was chosen to head a new school at Tuskegee. His rise to national prominence came in 1895 with a brief speech which outlined his social philosophy and racial strategy. Washington was invited to speak before an integrated audience at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta in September, 1895. He was the first Negro ever to address such a large group of southern whites.
Washington is remembered chiefly for this �Atlanta Compromise� address. In this speech, he called on white America to provide jobs and industrial-agricultural education for Negroes. In exchange, blacks would give up demands for social equality and civil rights. His message to the Negro was that political and social equality were less important as immediate goals than economic respectability and independence. Washington believed that if blacks gained an economic foothold, and proved themselves useful to whites, then civil rights and social equality would eventually be given to them. Blacks were urged to work as farmers, skilled artisans, domestic servants, and manual laborers to prove to whites that all blacks were not �liars and chicken thieves.�
The philosophy of Washington was one of accommodation to white oppression. He advised blacks to trust the paternalism of the southern whites and accept the fact of white supremacy. He stressed the mutual interdependence of blacks and whites in the South, but said they were to remain socially separate: �In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.� Washington counseled blacks to remain in the South, obtain a useful education, save their money, work hard, and purchase property. By doing such things, Washington believed, the Negro could ultimately �earn� full citizenship rights.
White Americans responded with enthusiasm to Washington�s racial policies, and made him the national Negro leader. �It startled the nation,� wrote DuBois, �to hear a Negro advocating such a program after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.� Northern whites saw in Washington�s doctrine a peace formula between the races in the South. Southern whites liked the program because it did not involve political, civil, and social aspirations, and it would consign the Negro to an inferior status.
Because Washington�s program conciliated whites, substantial contributions from white philanthropists were given to Tuskegee and other institutions that adopted the Washington philosophy. Washington�s prestige grew to the point where he was regarded as the spokesman for the entire Negro community. With strong white support, Washington became the outstanding black leader not only in the fields of education and philanthropy, but in business and labor relations, politics and all public affairs.
In 1901, Washington published his carefully executed and immensely popular autobiography, Up From Slavery. It is a classic �Horatio Alger� success story containing Washington�s program of accommodation and self-help. Up From Slavery gave an overly optimistic view of black life and race relations in America. It gave another boost to Washington�s career because it said what whites wanted to hear.
Washington�s career is full of paradoxes. He advised blacks to remain in the South and avoid politics and protest in favor of economic self-help and industrial education. But he became a powerful political boss and dispenser of patronage, the friend of white businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, and advisor of presidents. Washington publicly accepted without protest racial segregation and voting discrimination, but secretly financed and directed many court suits against such proscriptions of civil rights. He preached a gospel of Puritan morality and personal cleanliness, yet engaged in acts of sabotage and espionage against his black critics. Before whites he was a model of humility and ingratiation; to his staff and students at Tuskegee he was a benevolent despot.
Several Negro leaders voiced their opposition to Washington�s �Atlanta Compromise� with its admonition to work and wait. They could not topple Washington from power, but one of them did win recognition as a leader of the opposition�W. E. B. DuBois.
W. E. B. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. His family had not known the stigma of slavery for over a hundred years. DuBois was educated at Fisk University, Harvard University (where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1895) and the University of Berlin. DuBois was a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University where he conducted a series of sociological studies on the conditions of blacks in the South at the same time Washington was developing his program of industrial education.
DuBois was not an early opponent of Washington�s program. He enthusiastically accepted the Tuskegeean�s �Atlanta Compromise� philosophy as sound advice. He said in 1895 that Washington�s speech was �a word fitly spoken.� In fact, during the late 1890�s, there were several remarkable similarities in the ideas of the two men, who for a brief period found issues on which they could cooperate. Both Washington and DuBois tended to blame Negroes themselves for their condition. They both placed emphasis on self-help and moral improvement rather than on rights. Both men placed economic advancement before universal manhood suffrage. The professor and the principal were willing to accept franchise restrictions based on education and property qualifications, but not race. Both strongly believed in racial solidarity and economic cooperation, or black nationalism. They encouraged the development of Negro business. They agreed that the black masses should receive industrial training.
The years from 1901 to 1903 were years of transition in DuBois� philosophy. DuBois grew to find Washington�s program intolerable, as he became more outspoken about racial injustice and began to differ with Washington over the importance of liberal arts education when the latter�s emphasis on industrial education drew resources away from black liberal arts colleges. DuBois noted that Washington�s accommodating program produced little real gain for the race. Another factor that alienated DuBois from Washington was the fact that Washington and his �Tuskegee Machine��an intricate, nation-wide web of institutions in the black community that were conducted, dominated, and strongly influenced by Washington�kept a dictatorial control over Negro affairs that stifled honest criticism of his policies and other efforts at Negro advancement. DuBois came to view Washington as a political boss who had too much power and used it ruthlessly to his own advantage. Although DuBois admitted that he was worthy of honor, he believed Washington was a limited and misguided leader.
DuBois launched a well-reasoned, thoughtful, and unequivocal attack on Washington�s program in his classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. With the publication of this book, DuBois took the leadership in the struggle against Booker T. Washington and headed the radical protest movement for civil rights for Negroes. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois took the position that �the Black men of America have a duty to perform; a duty stern and delicate�a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader.�
In an essay entitled, �Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,� DuBois said that Washington�s accommodationist program asked blacks to give up political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education for Negro youth. He believed that Washington�s policies had directly or indirectly resulted in three trends: the disfranchisement of the Negro, the legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro, and steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. DuBois charged that Washington�s program tacitly accepted the alleged inferiority of the Negro. Expressing the sentiment of the radical civil rights advocates, DuBois demanded for all black citizens 1) the right to vote, 2) civic equality, and 3) the education of Negro youth according to ability. Generally, DuBois opposed Washington�s program because it was narrow in its scope and objectives, devalued the study of the liberal arts, and ignored civil, political, and social injustices and the economic exploitation of the black masses.
DuBois firmly believed that persistent agitation, political action, and academic education would be the means to achieve full citizenship rights for black Americans. His educational philosophy directly influenced his political approach. He stressed the necessity for liberal arts training because he believed that black leadership should come from college-trained backgrounds. DuBois� philosophy of the �Talented Tenth� was that a college-educated elite would chart, through their knowledge, the way for economic and cultural elevation for the black masses.
In 1905, DuBois helped found a radical civil rights protest organization called the �Niagara Movement� Its members were predominately northern, urban, college-educated black men�the �Talented Tenth.� This short-lived movement launched a campaign for complete equality and justice for blacks, with an emphasis on political rights. Lack of financial support caused the Niagara Movement�the direct forerunner of the NAACP�to dissolve by 1910.
In 1909, after an outbreak of rioting and murders of Negroes in Springfield, Illinois, a protest meeting was held in New York that led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. DuBois was one of the founding members of the organization. The NAACP was a coalition of black and white radicals which sought to remove legal barriers to full citizenship for Negroes. The association began an intensive campaign to bring about the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The NAACP fought against segregation and discrimination mainly in the courts.
DuBois was the director of NAACP publications and research, and founder-editor of the association�s official publication, The Crisis. This magazine, one of the best sources of information about the black world, became the vehicle through which DuBois could delineate his racial program and political ideals to the black American community. From 1910 to 1915, DuBois voiced the new aspirations of the American Negro in The Crisis. This was a period of increasing influence for the leadership of DuBois and the NAACP. Washington felt threatened by the rise of the association, and the ideological battle between Washington and DuBois continued until the former�s death in 1915.
Both Washington and DuBois wanted the same thing for blacks�first-class citizenship�but their methods for obtaining it differed. Because of the interest in immediate goals contained in Washington�s economic approach, whites did not realize that he anticipated the complete acceptance and integration of Negroes into American life. He believed blacks, starting with so little, would have to begin at the bottom and work up gradually to achieve positions of power and responsibility before they could demand equal citizenship�even if it meant temporarily assuming a position of inferiority. DuBois understood Washington�s program, but believed that it was not the solution to the �race problem.� Blacks should study the liberal arts, and have the same rights as white citizens. Blacks, DuBois believed, should not have to sacrifice their constitutional rights in order to achieve a status that was already guaranteed.
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ANSWER THE THREE QUESTIONS BELOW
1.    Booker T. Washington has often been characterized as an “Uncle Tom” (Wikipedia: Uncle Tom is a derogatory term for a person of a low status group who is overly subservient with authority, or a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people.)  From reading this  passage of the Atlanta Compromise Speech below, which seems to be particularly groveling and “boot-licking,” it appears that he deserves this label. What do you think?
. . . you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

2.Compare and contrast Washington’s  and Du Bois’ positions below.  With whom do you agree?
Washington (speaking about blacks who were newly emancipated from slavery) :
Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.. . .
Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

Du Bois:
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. . . .
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; . . .

3. The famous black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier put a new and devastating twist on W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of the Talented Tenth, in his 1957 book entitled The Black Bourgeoisie.  Whereas Du Bois’ Talented Tenth was portrayed as a leadership class which unselfishly dedicated to serving the masses of poor black people, unselfishly dedicated to the upliftment and advancement of the race, E. Franklin Frazier on the contrary, portrayed the same group as a parasitic class, which earned its wealth by leeching off the needs of the black masses, and who were only concerned with their own self-aggrandizement (making themselves look important), conspicuous consumption (buying fancy clothes, cars and homes for others to see and envy) and mimicking the white upper middle class or trying to “keep up with the Joneses” — even though their incomes were not in the same class as the white bourgeoisie. For Frazier the black bourgeoisie (black upper middle class) had abdicated and betrayed their role as a leadership class for black people.  Was Du Bois naïve in placing all of these hopes of leadership on the Talented Tenth or is Frazier being unjustly critical and pessimistic in his portrayal of the Black Bourgeoisie.