Booker T Washington vs. Dubois

From 1877 to 1915, African Americans were faced with a lot of hardships because of Jim Crow Laws, lynchings, and other forms of discrimination. During this period of time, two people in particular offered strategies for dealing with the troubles African Americans were going through. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois offered very diverse plans of action. While Washington wanted African Americans to go to school and get educated in agriculture, Dubois wanted them to protest for their civil rights. Though Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois often had opposing strategies for achieving African American equality, each had developed strategies that were appropriate for the time period. However, due to factors present at the time, neither civil rights leader was able to develop a wholly appropriate method for equality. Booker T. Washington was born a slave in the south so he knew about the struggles that African Americans had been going through because he went through them too. He used his experiences to help form his strategy for gaining equality. In his "Atlanta Compromise Address" he stated, “Cast down your bucket where you are…While doing this 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." He was telling the whites that if they would put their trust in AAs, they would not be let down. “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized,” he stated. Washington thought that AAs should go to technical schools, such as the Tuskegee Institute which he founded. He believed that if AAs were taught skills in agriculture instead of dead languages and superfluous studies, that they would succeed in finding work and fitting in with the white people. From 1860 to 1920, the percentage of blacks (ages 15-19) enrolled in school increased from zero to fifty percent and