Compare And Contrast Booker T. Washington And Marcus Garvey

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Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. DuBois were a few of the most prominent African-American leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All three of these prominent men urged radically different strategies for the uplifting of their race. Their different methods each gained widespread attention and popularity, causing both praise and criticism. This paper will argue that the ideas of W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey combined, would have been the most beneficial if implemented at that time because of their goals to obtain equal rights across every aspect of life and to celebrate their culture and home country as well as addressing both the practical and social sides of the issue.
Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta …show more content…

E. B. DuBois was born three years after the Civil War had ended and had comfortably gone to school with white people, he did not experience the problems of social segregation until he moved to Tennessee to further his education. DuBois did not agree with much of what Booker T. Washington stood for. DuBois demanded equality for African Americans, he did not want to sit and wait for it to happen. Equality, for him, should not be worked towards gradually, rather it should be expected. The fourteenth amendment had already been passed but was being neglected and not enforced. He had this understanding that there was a double-consciousness that existed amongst everyone, regardless of race or gender. (DuBois, p. 68) However, it impacted African Americans in a negative way. A black man living in a white dominated America has both the identity of an American as well as a black American. His book, “The Souls of Black Folk”, discusses his idea that black and white people are separated from this invisible colorline. He writes that , “Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism.”(DuBois p.202) DuBois understood that white Americans did not fully recognize blacks as being as much of an American as they are. What he fought for was not specific, rather it was an all encompassing idea that full equality was