Which of these BEST describes the differences between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington?
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Answer:Though Washington was born a slave, the scope and influence of his public life in the twentieth century rival that of Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century. Though his career as racial spokesman was based on the idea that African Americans should eschew political agitation for civil rights in favor of industrial education and agricultural expertise, Washington's secret activities, his attempt to exercise private influence on matters having to do with racial discrimination and segregation, suggest that his was a paradoxical life indeed. For how else are we to account for Washington's “Atlanta Exposition Address” of 1895 and his attempts to challenge racial discrimination and segregated facilities by covert legal means?
To penetrate the mysteries swirling about the persona of Booker T. Washington, we must understand something of the times in which he lived and why the issues of African American leadership-who would lead and what kinds of political spoils they could garner for the African American community—played such an essential role in the African American's attempt to participate fully in American life. For Washington, participation meant identifying, and being identified with, the status quo, the dominant way of thinking in American life and culture. Thus, as Sheldon Avery has observed, Washington's positions on laissez-faire capitalism, Christian morality, and middle-class values allowed him to channel a large portion of white philanthropic dollars and black patronage through the Tuskegee machine.
If Washington's racial accommodation is unpalatable, it needs to be understood in light of his beginnings in West Virginia. As the son of Jane Ferguson, a slave, and a white father whom he never knew (though he conjectures in his autobiography that his father was his master), Washington sought to convey that his childhood had been one of poverty, not racial oppression. From working in the coal furnaces and salt mines of West Virginia to doing housework, Washington's insistence is that he achieved his position as racial spokesman through hard physical labor. He goes to great lengths, for example, to describe his admittance into Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1872 as the result of his ability to clean and dust a classroom. It is clear that Hampton would have a profound impact on Washington's views, for it was there he met General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who would become his mentor and benefactor. Graduating from Hampton in 1875 with honors, Washington returned to Hampton briefly after two years of teaching back in his native West Virginia to implement a program for Native Americans. In 1881 Armstrong recommended Washington to the Alabama legislature, which was seeking to open a normal school for African American students in Tuskegee.
The Booker T. Washington who thus emerges in Up from Slavery (1901) is a humble, moral, disciplined man whose life is devoted to the improvement of the Negro. And it is Tuskegee Institute, where he served as principal from 1881 until his death in 1915, that best demonstrates these traits. Culminating with his speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, and his honorary degree from Harvard in 1897, Washington's treatment of his life is characterized by his ability to hold the most unassuming exchange up as a shining example of his links to the working man. Though Washington would endear himself to industrialists like Andrew Carnegic and John D. Rockefeller (at least in part because of his antiunion stancé), he nonetheless claimed to champion the cause of economic opportunity for all.
Washington's career in the public sphere seems to grow from his success at Tuskegee, but it is just as much a result of the profound link between his life as an educator and fundraiser and his writing, for it is Washington's ability to control his image by recycling the positive assessments of his work into his books that makes him a credible public figure. Between 1896 and 1913 Washington produced nearly twenty works ranging from his two autobiographies, The Story of My Life and Work (1900) and the aforementioned Up from Slavery, to a biography of Frederick Douglass (1907). Moreover, it could be argued that Washington was one of the first African American writers to connect the “self-help” book to issues of African American citizenship, which explains titles like Working with the Hands, Putting the Most into Life, and Sowing and Reaping.
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