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• 1 media/Booker T. Washington Atlanta Compromise.jpeg 2018-03-14T17:29:33-07:00 Racial Equality 18 image_header 2018-06-17T20:19:07-07:00 By 1895, many Northern blacks, along with several Southern blacks, grew impatient with the plodding, kowtowing nature of accommodationism. In 1895, Booker T. Washington gained national fame when he delivered his “Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. African Americans were honored that one of their own would address a predominantly white audience. With typical eloquence, Washington praised the accomplishments of his people yet conceded that Negroes had erred by seeking political office immediately after emancipation. He explained that African Americans should begin at the bottom and not the top of society, and that Negroes should earn white people's respect by gaining economic equity. Negroes, he explained, didn't want to mix with whites socially; instead they sought to provide industry and trade to improve the Southern economy. At first, black America cheered Washington's achievement, but soon well-educated Negroes like W.E.B Du Bois grew appalled that Washington had agreed segregation was acceptable. Washington's opponents accused him of selling out to whites by keeping his people subjugated so Washington could continue as their spokesman.  Du Bois argued that Negroes should not be relegated to trade, instead they should study the Classics such as Latin and Greek in white colleges. He encouraged Negroes to pursue a liberal arts education and become doctors, lawyers, and professors at universities such as Harvard and Princeton. According to Du Bois, industrial education was an insult to his race.
  In 1909, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that would challenge discrimination, segregation, and disfranchisement through the court system and is still in effect today. It strategically selected cases that would promote African American equality.
   
• 1 media/The Atlanta Conference NAACP.jpg 2018-04-07T02:17:17-07:00 The Other 90% 8 image_header 2018-06-11T19:03:15-07:00 Over time, Du Bois grew increasingly distainful of his own people. He thought black churches needed to be reformed so “colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things.” He referred to The Crisis as the “Guardian of Liberties.” In 1913, he chastised three Negro publications for disagreeing with him because Negroes had enough conflicts without engaging in squabbling, all the while doing the same to Booker T. Washington. The next year he chastised other Negro publications for their poor grammar and spelling and lack of factual data. When editors expressed indignation, he sidestepped by saying he was expressing popular opinion, not his own. In 1912, Du Bois wrote in The Crisis, “to treat all Negroes alike is treating evil as good and good as evil,” and again in 1919, “many a colored man in our day called to conference with his own and rather dreading the contact with uncultivated people even though they were of his own blood.”
  When Du Bois published Booker T. Washington’s obituary in The Crisis in 1915, he qualified each of Washington's successes by pointing out that in each accomplishment, Washington had failed to recognize the connection between economic equality and political equality. He blamed the current state of Negro affairs squarely on Booker T. Washington.