Booker T. Washington was born enslaved in Virginia in 1856. When slavery ended, he was nine years old. He came of age during Reconstruction, the period in U.S. History from 1865-1877 following the end of the Civil War . For many African Americans, this was a period of hope. After 250 years of legalized slavery, Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which extended freedom, citizenship, and male suffrage to African Americans. However, this 11-year period of optimism and possibility quickly gave way to discrimination, horror, and brutality as former Confederates and other white supremacists regained power.

Washington witnessed the use of racial violence as a common method to intimidate Black people. Sharecropping left the majority of southern Blacks in debt and tied to the land, just like during the days of slavery. Washington pursued an education at Hampton Institute, a school in southeastern Virginia for formerly enslaved people; he would return there in 1879 to teach before becoming the principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. He later established the Negro Businesses League, which sought to promote the interests of Black businesses and secure funding for schools across the South to use his Tuskegee model.

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War. Although slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts in 1783, Black people still faced economic hardships and racial discrimination in the North. This in turn hindered their ability to excel in society and contributed to extreme levels of poverty among the Black community. Du Bois’s mother was born free, and she and Du Bois lived in a mostly tolerant and integrated society. At his mother’s urging, he became the first in his family to complete high school.

In 1888, he graduated from Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, and later went on to become the first Black man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Yet his time therewas not free of discrimination; at first, Harvarddid not want to honor his Fisk degree. In 1896, Du Bois started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. While there, he studied the Black community in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Du Bois witnessed firsthand the effects that a lack of education had on the Black community and published his findings. After growing frustrated with the slow pace of racial and societal change, he joined the Niagara Movement, which eventually evolved into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a major engine in the civil rights movement.