Leaders Emerge in the Early Civil Rights Movement (2024)

Booker T. Washington

Born into bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many Black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute, the leadership of which he would retain from 1881until his death in 1915. Tuskegee was an all-Black “normal school”—an old term for a teachers’ college—teaching African Americans a curriculum geared towards practical skills such as cooking, farming, and housekeeping. Graduates would often then travel through the South, teaching new farming and industrial techniques to rural communities. Washington encouraged the school’s graduates to focus on the Black community’s self-betterment and prove that they were productive members of society even in freedom—something many White Americans throughout the nation vocally doubted.

Washington envisioned that Tuskegee’s contribution to Black life would come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth, even while living within the constraints of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading White philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.

In a speech delivered at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, which was meant to promote the economy of a “New South,” Washington proposed what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise. Speaking to a racially mixed audience, Washington called upon African Americans to work diligently for their own uplift and prosperity rather than preoccupy themselves with political and civil rights. Their success and hard work, he implied, would eventually convince southern Whites to grant these rights.In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court’sPlessyv.Fergusondecision that legalized segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, Washington said to White Americans, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”[1]

Not surprisingly, most White people liked Washington’s model of race relations, since it placed the burden of change on Black people and required nothing of them. Wealthy industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller provided funding for many of Washington’s self-help programs, as did Sears, Roebuck & Co. co-founder Julius Rosenwald, and Washington was the first African American invited to the White House by President Roosevelt in 1901. At the same time, his message also appealed to many in the Black community, and some attribute this widespread popularity to his consistent message that social and economic growth, even within a segregated society, would do more for African Americans than an all-out agitation for equal rights on all fronts.

Washington was both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America’s unjust racial hierarchy; his public advocacy of a conciliatory posture toward White supremacy concealed the efforts to which he went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiographyUp from Slavery(1901).

W.E.B. Dubois

Despite his substantial contributions, many African Americans disagreed with Washington’s approach. Much in the same manner that Alice Paul felt the pace of the struggle for women’s rights was moving too slowly under the NAWSA, some within the African American community felt that immediate agitation for the rights guaranteed under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, was necessary. In 1905, a group of prominent civil rights leaders, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, met in a small hotel on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls—where segregation laws did not bar them from hotel accommodations—to discuss what immediate steps were needed for equal rights. Du Bois, a professor at the all-Black Atlanta University and the first African American with a doctorate from Harvard, emerged as the main spokesperson for what would later be dubbed the Niagara Movement. By 1905, he had grown wary of Booker T. Washington’s calls for African Americans to accommodate White racism and focus solely on self-improvement. Du Bois and others wished to carve a more direct path towards equality that drew on the political leadership and litigation skills of the Black, educated elite, which he termed the talented tenth.

At the meeting, Du Bois led the others in drafting a “Declaration of Principles,” which called for immediate political, economic, and social equality for African Americans. These rights included universal suffrage, compulsory education, and the elimination of the convict lease system in which tens of thousands of Black prisoners had endured slavery-like conditions in southern road construction, mines, prisons, and penal farms since the end of Reconstruction. Within a year, Niagara chapters had sprung up in twenty-one states across the country. By 1908, internal fights over the role of women in the fight for African American equal rights lessened interest in the Niagara Movement. But it played an important role in preparing the groundwork for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. Du Bois served as the influential director of publications for the NAACP from its inception until 1933. As the editor of the journal The Crisis, Du Bois had a platform to express his views on a variety of issues facing African Americans in the later Progressive Era, as well as during World War I and its aftermath.

In both Washington and Du Bois, African Americans found leaders to push forward the fight for their place in the new century, each with a very different strategy. Both men cultivated the conditions in which a new generation of African American spokespeople and leaders would establish the modern civil rights movement after World War II.