Declaration of Independence
all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Timeline of Important Events
The Thirteenth Amendment (1865): slavery was officially abolished in all areas of the United
States.
The Fourteenth Amendment (1868): made the African American a citizen and prohibited the
States from denying or abridging the fundamental rights of every citizen, requiring them to grant
all persons equal protection and due process.
The Fifteenth Amendment (1869): ensured that a person's race, color, or prior history as a slave
could not be used to bar that person from voting. Though a noble idea, it had little practical effect
for quite some time, as the Southern states found myriad ways to intimidate blacks to keep them
from voting (Jim Crow; poll taxes).
Plessey vs. Ferguson (1892): Legalizes “Separate but Equal”
The Birth of Segregation: 1880s - 1900s:
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Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court case decided 1896
o Homer Adolph Plessy, legally considered black but 7/8 white, was removed from
a (whites only) Louisiana passenger train car; he sued, arguing that this
separation deprived him of his 14th Amendment privileges
The Court ruled that "separate but equal" was not unconstitutional, that the 'races'
could be separated out legally, as long as the separate facilities were equal. Of course,
'equal' was in the eye of the holder of power.
"Jim Crow" laws:
o Throughout the South, a biracial legal system was created in which one set of
laws and rules applied to whites and one set to blacks.
o There were separate facilities regarding public transportation (e.g. trains, busses),
in barber shops, schools, cafes, restaurants, bars, and so forth. Obviously, none
were as good for Negroes as for Whites.
Violence continues: Terror and public lynchings not only murder and terrorize but
enforce a mindset of utter separation, superiority / inferiority
The ideology of race separation, black inferiority is popularly and socially reinforced:
Public campaigns and popular media proliferate imagery of black inferiority
Booker T. Washington Atlanta Compromise (1895): endorses “separate but equal”
Souls of Black Folk (1903): impressed upon the world the particular experience of being an
African American in fourteen essays on various topics, from a history of the U.S. government's
efforts at Reconstruction to a discussion of the role of religion in the black community. DuBois
provides insight into the ways that the African-American culture is intrinsic to the larger
American culture, and how history has made that relationship inherently problematic.
The New Negro (1925): themes of entrance of “new Negro” onto the world scene with a new
social type and a new psychology; the dialectical relationship between an outer reality (social,
political, and cultural conditions) and inner consciousness; pan-Africanism and the importance of
uniting African-Americans with oppressed and politically awakening peoples worldwide; the
significance of cultural renewal in bringing about social and political progress; the authenticity of
"folk" culture and the dangers inherent in empty imitation of "high" culture forms; the role that
the "enlightened minorities" of each race must play in bringing the races together; the urgency of
seeing racial interests in a "new and enlarged way" that would ultimately transcend a narrowly
racialist vision.
Central Key: Race Uplift
BOOKER T WASHINGTON
The great race leader of 1900 - Booker T. Washington.
African Americans in 1900 adored Booker T. Washington for his contributions, for his answers,
for his solutions to many of the problems that African Americans felt in the South.
He symbolized hopefulness in a bleak and hopeless era.
A Man Born a Slave
 Washington was born a slave.
 Washington had worked his way from being a slave to being a coal miner as a little boy, to
working for a wealthy white woman, to being the favorite Samuel Chapman Armstrong at
Hampton Institute in Virginia, to setting up this school in Tuskegee.
 He had worked every step of the way and he had worked hard.
 He was a Southerner.
 He felt that he understood the African Americans in the South better than other leaders.
 After witnessing the oppression and setbacks described above, and seeing the abandonment
of blacks by the federal government, Washington concludes that blacks cannot confront and
change the system from the bottom-up, but from the top-down.
o They must train themselves in work skills and industry and slowly, over time,
their self-improvement will convince whites that it would be in their interests to
unite.
o This view was most famously presented in a speech in Atlanta in 1895 to a
mixed-race crowd in the Atlanta Exposition.
A Program of Vocational Education
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Some call his program industrial education but it is also referred to as vocational
education.
o One way of looking at solutions for African Americans.
Vocational education for Washington meant living in the South in the economic
condition in which one found it.
Another aspect of his program as a solution to the problems for African Americans was
to create their own businesses, to create the National Negro Business League.
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Through vocational education as the foundation, African Americans were to set up
independent entrepreneurships and to depend on each other.
His solution was one of self-help.
o A youth, for example, should not be educated away from his environment but get
the training suitable to his/her peculiar situation -- training that lays a foundation
for the future in the present situation. Once this is obtained, the person can then
emerge into something above and beyond his/her beginnings (achieve social and
political equality once economic equality/prominence is obtained).
Washington's position, considering the circumstances African Americans were in, held
that they had to toil/labor and therefore should get the education to toil skillfully.
He did not openly attack higher education for African Americans but believed in an
education providing them some usefulness – a means to economic prosperity.
Atlanta Compromise Speech
He said to whites of the South, cast down your bucket where you are, cast it down among the
black people who have been your friend for generations, who when you went off to fight the Civil
War, kept the fields and took care of your wives and children.
He said to the African Americans, cast down your bucket where you are, cast it down among the
white men who have helped you to build up the South all these generations.
Remaining Separate
“We can be as separate as the five fingers on the hand and as one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress.”
 He thought both races could win – separately.
 African Americans could win because they would attain and maintain the good will of
whites through economic advancement, leading to eventual social and political uplift...
 Whites could win because they would be as he said, living amongst the most peaceful,
loyal and loving race that the world had ever known.
W.E.B. DUBOIS
DuBois was a free-born man, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, of a free-born mother and
a father.
He had grown up in a white environment.
He had graduated from a high school in which he was the only black. He had studied at Fisk, then
he had studied at Harvard. Got a B.A., cum laude, an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Then he
studied two years at Berlin.
Theoretical Opposition
 DuBois, living and working in the North and one of the first Sociologists in the country, came
to the opposite conclusion to Washington: In a context of racist violence and brute official
repression and disrespect, equality would never be achieved without agitation and protest.
 DuBois viewed Washington's strategy as actually harmful to black freedom, and instead
advocated the including of blacks in higher academic education, lifting up a portion of the
population (a "Talented Tenth" as he called this portion in 1903) to prominent leadership.
 DuBois respected Washington as one of the first true black intellectuals who tried to help the
black race.
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He did admit that Washington was partly right in that men had to make their
living, and the better the living, other things being equal, the better the man.
However, he criticized his self-help approach.
o "One hesitates, therefore, to criticize a life which beginning with so little, has
done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and
utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career as
well as of his triumphs, without being captious or envious, and without forgetting
that it is easier to do ill than well in the world". “Of Booker T. Washington and
Others” from The Souls of Black Folk.
 DuBois believed that "the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by
voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a
people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the
contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to
modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as
well as white boys."