Booker T. Washington's Argumentative Essay

In the age of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” program, Americans viewed formal education as a road to equality amongst social groups, and many of the immigrants and their descendants eagerly embraced schooling as a means of upward mobility. Even though this theory was the farthest thing away from the truth, these schools were separated and grouped children according to their culture, religion, and class as well as skin color. These schools were established by reformers and missionaries who mostly focused on the teaching of practical trades to students. Such schools as the Carlisle Indian School, where boys learned to make harnesses, tin pots and pans, wagons, and carriages, among other products, many of which were sold to local
residents to raise money for the school. Girls also had a role in this industrialized school, they took in laundry and ironed, also part of the school’s effort to raise money. This type of curriculum main goal was to enable the pupils to become more self-sufficient upon graduation. All over the country North and South people grew more concerned about the education of blacks particularly in the south. After the Civil War had taken place, the south was very extremely poor and many blacks lived in rural areas. Philanthropist residing from the north sought after education of these young people, such as Julius Rosenwald Chicago, upheld the notion of segregated public schools. Born into slavery in 1858, Booker T.
Washington had worked in West Virginia Coal mines before attending Hampton Normal School and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. In 1881 he assumed the leadership of Tuskegee Institute, an Alabama school for blacks founded on the Hampton model. Washington spoke at many rally’s and conventions one of his most significant appearance was at the Cotton States Exposition, a fair held in Atlanta in 1895, where he urged southern black to “Cast down your buckets where you are –in other words to remain in the south and to concentrate on manual skills that would bring a measure of self-supporting to black families. Although this was not the solution to the racial discrimination blacks were experience, Washington saw it as a way of moving upward on the ladder in society. I opposition W E B Du Bois was inferior to the fact that Washington had made such great efforts towards the new evolving blacks with equality and educational rights, suddenly things turned into a downward spiraling effect. Washington tried to persuade his followers to let go of the fuss about voting rights, civic equality and the education. Challenging Washington’s message the northern scholar-activist disagreed with the notions that blacks conform and occupy certain second hand citizen jobs such as maids, carpenters, and sharecroppers. In that same address Washington tried to persuade the whites to refrain from the attacks of innocent men, women, and children. Most whites hailed
for the “Atlanta Compromise” proposal as one that endorsed segregation and second-class citizenship for blacks. According to Du Bois, Washington’s proposal was not enough for our young black people it was conformity at its best. The goals of the program were only to train black men, women, and children in particular trades in order to support them in life, it basically degradation of them to second class citizenship. Even though Du Bois reacted negatively to the address, he mentions a few things in Chapter 3 that he did agree on, such things as the notion of blacks educating themselves period. Du Bois never disagreed with Washington’s argument about going to school and bettering your economic and social status, but he felt that Washington’s approach was an incomplete plan in which did not fulfill the re-socialization of blacks in education. While Washington cared less about the Civil Rights movement amongst the blacks; Du Bois was more focused on the training young black ambitious minds. Racial groups such as the radicals, who received it as a complete surrender for the demand of civil and political equality and then there were the conservatives who generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. Both sides approved it, but next were gaining place and consideration in the north. Among his own followers, however, Mr. Washington had encountered his strongest and most lasting resistance. Amounting at times to bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent even though largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of the nation. Most admired his sincerity of purpose, Mr. Washington’s program unsurprisingly took an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost complete to overshadow the higher aims to life, the program accepted alleged inferiority of the Negro race. Du Bois not only thought of Washington’s doctrine as a failure, but he also felt that he needed to be criticized, and that the whites from the North and the South had shifted the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders.
While it was the entire nation that set the stage for this issue years before the Civil War, Du Bois explains that none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. Everyone is born to be a free man and no person deserves to be called second class citizen just based on the color of his/her skin, class, and etc. Washington’s program in my opinion was not to keep the Negro race down under any other race, but it was to keep down the fuss that was going on, I feel as though he focused more on keeping the conflict to a minimum, it seemed like the more African Americans pushed for civil rights the more that the other races deviated from it. They were prone to attacking and lynching and many other brutal unlawful
punishments. Both Washington and Du Bois wanted first-class citizenship for black but each went by obtaining this differently. But because of the immediate need for such a reform, whites did not realize how much Washington anticipated blacks becoming more integrated into society. Basically starting from the bottom working their way to the top was the plan Washington had in mind, while Du Bois felt that this was not the solution to the racial problem and that Blacks should not have to throw out there constitutional rights just to obtain the status that every American citizen was born with.