Comparison of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois

Two African American leaders spokesmen Booker T Washington and W.E.B. Dubois have similar goals for the black culture. Both, Washington and Dubois wanted first class citizenship for blacks. They disagreed in the manner in which they were to obtain this level of citizenship. Washington preached on how African American needed to work their way up to being equal. Dubois believed that being well educated would mandate their way to being equal.

Booker T. Washington was founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school in Alabama. He believed that the Negroes should be trained in industrial and agricultural education. Washington hoped to train the blacks for real life situations. He saw being trained for the real world was more important than being book smart. He felt like education should teach them how to do their jobs. Booker believed that blacks would never be equal to whites. This they should accept and not fight. He also advised them to trust the whites. He stressed that the black and whites where to remain separate socially: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet as one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress"(Washington 681).

W.E.B Dubois was one of the founding members of the NAACP. He firmly believed that for black Americans to gain strong citizenship rights they needed to get a good education. His philosophy on a first class education was liberal arts training. Dubois though that black leadership education should come from a college level training. Dubois had a different out look on being equal than Washington. Instead of sitting back and working for our citizenship. Dubois demanded his citizenship as the white man. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of he Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"(DuBois 910).

If we define rights as God-given and entitlements as government-given it's easy to understand each man's vision for the integration of the black population within a predominately white population. Dubois maintained that rights were not "earned" and that government would mandate the specifications as needed to insure that those rights were not "earned", but believed that the black man's true

realization of those rights could not be mandated by government policy; that true integration would occur only