Around the end of the 19th century, there lived many people wanting equality between races. Two main leaders of the African American community that emerged during that time were W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. All though both of these men were fighting for the same cause, they disagreed greatly with each other relating to the strategies that could be used to create progress in both the social and economic aspects of how African Americans lived and were treated. The two conflicting philosophies of these men are still affecting how we think of racial inequality, social class injustice, and much more; to this day. In my opinion, I think that it is interesting to know what kinds of backgrounds these men came from and how they shaped what views these men had on these racial issues late in their lives. On April 5, 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington’s life began as he was born to a slave in the town of Franklin County, Virginia; not the best start. In most of the states of America preexisting our Civil War, law was that the child of a slave was automatically a slave. Booker T. Washington’s mother had received a job as the cook for their plantation owner and his father had not much known about him …show more content…
In conclusion, even though these men wanted the same thing; black equality, they went about creating it in different ways. Booker T. Washington mainly wanted to compromise his way with the whites into black equality. He urged blacks to deal with the discrimination for the time being and then to work their way up through society with mainly prosperity and hard work. On the other hand, W.E.B. DuBois focused on African-Americans being smart enough so that they could go anywhere in life. Education wise, he thought blacks should be exactly like whites, with a very high education and IQ. To do this he wanted African-Americans to know how to read, write, and have and organized education system. In his mind, the smarter they got, the more equal that blacks were to the