U.S. History Collection
You Decide: Washington or Du Bois?

Politics

Issue #2: Accommodation or Agitation?

Perhaps the greatest difference between Washington’s and Du Bois’s philosophies was their views on how to fight segregation and achieve equality.

Booker T. Washington

Washington practiced the politics of accommodation, or compromise, that played down the importance of pursuing civil rights and social equality among the races in favor of economic and educational advances for African Americans. Throughout most of his career, his public statements were cautious, conservative, and designed not to cause open conflict with the whites who held political power. His program stressed patience, as he believed that civil rights would eventually come without provocation. Despite his public pronouncements, Washington had an elaborate “secret life” that found him fighting for civil rights privately by financing court cases, using his political clout to influence national leaders, and even helping Du Bois on several civil rights matters behind the scenes.

“The agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”

W. E. B. Du Bois

While Washington was a practical political boss willing to accommodate the realities of racism in the South, Du Bois emphasized the importance of vigorous protest against racial injustice. The Niagara Movement, which Du Bois founded in 1905, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) both used public protest as a means of redressing grievances. While at the NAACP, Du Bois served as editor of its magazine, The Crisis. He worked hard to bring attention to the widespread practice of lynching that had been used to terrorize Black men and women since Emancipation. He eventually resigned his position at the NAACP board after he changed his stance on segregation and began to see it as an acceptable arrangement between the races.

“The American Negro demands equality—political equality, industrial equality, and social equality; and he is never going to rest satisfied with anything less. He demands this . . . as an absolute measure of self-defense and the only one that will assure to the darker races their ultimate survival on earth.”

Take Notes

Based upon their positions on political policy, who do you believe had a better vision for improving the conditions of African Americans in the early 1900s, Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois, and why?

African American male drinking from a segregated water cooler in Oklahoma.

A black and white photo shows a neatly dressed Black youth drinking water he got from a water cooler with a signed that reads "Colored."

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