Booker T. Washington implied that political and social power…
Booker T. Washington implied that political and social power cannot exist without economic power. WEB Dubois argued the opposite. Essay Task:Discuss and describe the key differences between Booker T. Washington’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s strategies for racial uplift and social progress. Discuss how each man’s background and the historical context of the Jim Crow era influenced his ideas. Evaluate which approach you believe was adopted by most African Americans. Additionally, do you agree with Booker T. Washington’ statement that political and social power cannot exist without economic power? In other words, do you need to have money to have political power? Your essay should be at least 250 words. Document A: Booker T. Washington (Modified) This is an excerpt from a speech Booker T. Washington delivered in 1895 at theopening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. Theexposition promoted the American South and touted its agricultural and technologicalachievements. Almost 800,000 visitors attended from around the world, and theinvitation to speak at its opening was a great honor. Washington’s speech was widelyapplauded at the time and helped to make him the most powerful African Americanleader in the United States. His critics would later call his address the “AtlantaCompromise” speech because he appealed, in part, to white Southerners who wereoppressing African Americans in the Jim Crow Era.______________________________________________________________________________ To those of my race who want to move to a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. 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 if we learn to dignify and glorify common labor. . . . 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. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities. To those of the white race who look to immigrants for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know. . . . Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, and built your railroads and cities. . . . 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 theworld 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. The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in anydegree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house. Source: Excerpt from Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Address, 1895. Document B: W.E.B. Du Bois (Modified) The most influential critique of Booker T. Washington’s ideas came in 1903 whenW.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. The following is an excerpt from thebook.______________________________________________________________________________ Mr. Washington asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things— First, political power; Second, insistence on civil rights; Third, higher education of Negro youth—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. . . . What has been the return? . . . 1. The disfranchisement of the Negro. 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. These movements are not . . . direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. Is it possible . . . that [African Americans] can make economic progress if they are deprived of political rights and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? . . . [The] answer. . . is an emphatic No. . . . So far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, . . . does not value the privilege and duty of voting, . . . and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds, we must firmly oppose them. . . . We must strive for the rights . . . which the sons of the 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.” Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903). Document C: Differences among African Americans African Americans divided over the white supremacist campaigns of the late nineteenth century. Some educated middle-class black southerners suggested that limiting suffrage to the literate might not be such a bad idea. The most influential black man in America, Booker T. Washington—a former slave and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school in Alabama—implied in an 1895 speech in Atlanta that African Americans should leave politics to white men and focus instead on economic advancement. Suffrage was only one avenue to power, said Washington; labor that resulted in savings, he explained, amounted to “a little green ballot” that “no one will throw out or refuse to count.” Dubbed the Atlanta Compromise by more radical African Americans, Washington’s position was later ridiculed by northern black scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who remarked acidly that “the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them. Source: Textbook excerpt from Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History from 1877.
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