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Washington T. Booker's Fight For Equality

Decent Essays

During the twentieth century people in America fought for the equality of African Americans, but the means on how to achieve equality has been heavily debated between many activists such as Washington T. Booker and W.E.B DuBois. Even though they share a common goal their stances on education and methods of achieving equality are different with Washington thinking working hard earns respect and DuBois thinking that African Americans need to demand for equality. Booker believed African Americans would be able to have more of a chance in being respected by focusing their education on having jobs involving manual labor and technical skills such as engineering. Rather than focusing solely on having an education in history, literature, science and …show more content…

Now that time has passed and most African Americans have not used and forgotten those skills in his opinion they need to relearn those skills since they are equally or even more important than the education they are learning at universities. Even though the way they learned how to do those jobs was crude it allowed them to have industrial training and learn the methods of skilled labor in the south. Without this training Booker thought that African Americans would stay at the bottom of the economic world and never advance however, by having this skill they would be able to work themselves up through this ladder achieving respect and equality through it. Thus the basis of his fight for equality was to work hard at any jobs they had and respect will be earned through that work. On the other hand W.E.B DuBois believed that African Americans in the past have done the menial jobs that don’t require a higher education and it has done nothing to aid them in improving their situation so they should rise above having to do those jobs. This reasoning was why DuBois critiqued Washington’s stance on education. Believing that in order to be respected African Americans need to

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