Two Negro American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Dubois steered the struggle to raise the living standards of the Negro American citizens who were facing discrimination from the dominating white Americans. The goal was common for the two, but they differed in the strategy of achieving this common goal. For a couple of decades, Booker T. Washington enjoyed a dominant tone of convincing the Negro Americans to gradually accommodate amongst themselves and the white Americans, only to realize that leadership was slowly passing to more vibrant and militant leaders like W.E.B. Dubois.
Booker T. Washington is remembered for his famous address dubbed “Atlanta Compromise”, where he urged the white American to provide jobs and education for the Negro Americans who would, in turn, give up their demands for their civil and political rights. His ideology suggested that Negro Americans should be accommodative to the white oppressors (Verney, 2013). He urged the Black Americans to accept the white supremacy and move on to their second place position.
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As a gardener and a child of a peasant farmer working for the White Americans, I strongly support W.E.B Dubois ideology of dealing with the White Supremacists. I totally agree with his militant approach in pushing for the rights of the Negro community. In my view, the Negros just like the White Americans share a common underlying factor, they are both from human race, this therefore means that they are equal and should share equal rights. None of the two races should find itself more important than the other to a point of rendering the other one useless. Even as a gardener, a job lowly regarded in the American society, I aspire to grow and develop my skills in gardening so that in the near future my art would be celebrated largely by the society. This can only happen when the people I work for do not take me for a lesser person but rather looks at me as an equal human who is talented differently from them. This is what W.E.B Dubois stood for, that human would be looked at with the same lens regardless of the skin color. The Negro community of today are still suffering discrimination especially in job allocation with the low paying jobs believed to be their portion. The Negro community should stand firm against this kind of prejudice and demand for equal opportunities in job allocation. Demand because equal rights is an entitlement that no one should beg for.
I strongly support W.E.B. Dubois style of agitating the Negro Americans to firmly stand for themselves, leading them in various protests against the White Supremacies. It is through these protests that the voice of Black Americans got to be heard. The foundation laid by W.E.B Dubois in fighting for the rights of the Negros leveled the ground for less regarded people like myself to voice our problems whenever faced by any. We are therefore able to raise the issues affecting us and refuse to settle for the lesser position in the society (Claiborne & Gibbon, 2016). Booker T. on the other hand expressed that the Negro Americans were weaklings who could fit in the second class group. How could he even claim that he was fighting for the Negro Americans while standing on the side of the oppressors?
I also disagree with Booker T. Washington ideologies urging the Negro Americans to accommodate suppression. In my view, he did not believe that Negro Americans also had human dignity like the oppressors. His arguments were in themselves discriminative and could only yield inferiority complex, disfranchisement as well as aid withdrawal from learning institution accommodating black (DuBois, W. 2013). In my view, Booker T. Washington ideology was narrow in its scope and failed to address various issues that affected the Negro Americans. It undermined the dignity of Negros and did not see any value in studying liberal arts. Furthermore, it ignored political, social and civil injustices as well as the economic exploitation of the Negros.
References
Claiborne, T., & Gibbon, P. (2016). Much Ado About the Blacks: Booker T., WEB, and others on Educating African Americans.
DuBois, W. E. B. (2013). WEB DuBois on sociology and the Black community . University of Chicago Press.
Verney, K. J. (2013 ). The art of the possible: Booker T. Washington and black leadership in the United States , 1881-1925. Routledge.
