2
Origins of the Movement
Washington, Booker T.
(1856–1915): Ex-slave
who founded Tuskegee
Institute to promote his
belief that blacks should
seek economic self-
reliance first, not politi-
cal equality.
Disfranchisement: The
various means, such as
the poll tax and white
primaries, to prevent
blacks from voting.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
(1862–1931): Crusader
against lynching and
NAACP co-founder.
Du Bois, W.E.B.(1868–
1963): Harvard-trained
intellectual and NAACP
co-founder who believed
that the black elite should
lead the race in demand-
ing equality.B
lacks were never reconciled to their inferior status and kept search-
ing for the best approach that offered a way out. As stepchildren in
American society, blacks alternately pursued assimilation with whites
and independence from them. One school of thought was that blacks should
accommodate themselves to overwhelming white power. Booker T.
Washington, a former Virginia slave and the nation’s most powerful black
man, declared that agitating for equality was ‘the extremist folly’ and pro-
posed that blacks accept temporarily their second-class citizenship. As the
founder of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute for industrial training, he delivered
a controversial speech before the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1895, in
which he appealed to whites to accept blacks as partners in reviving the
South’s lagging economy. He thought that once blacks had proven their
worth in the marketplace political equality and social integration would
follow. With little fanfare, he pressed the black cause through northern
philanthropy, patronage appointments, and lawsuits.
Other black leaders dismissed Washington’s accommodationism as disas-
trous. Black patience did nothing to stop lynching, disfranchisement, and
Jim Crow. William Monroe Trotter of the Boston Guardiancalled the Wizard
of Tuskegee a ‘skulking coward.’ Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an outspoken jour-
nalist from Memphis, Tennessee, chided black leaders who remained silent
after lynchings and warned that stopping such atrocities might require all-
out race warfare. Washington’s most persistent critic was W.E.B. Du Bois,
the first black person to earn a Harvard doctorate. In his book The Souls of
Black Folk, he charged Washington with counseling blacks to accept inferior-
ity to whites. To chart a more militant direction, white and black progres-
sives, including Du Bois and Wells-Barnett, founded what became the largest,
most important civil rights organization of the twentieth century, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
After Booker T. Washington died in 1915, gradualism subsided in favor of
more forceful approaches to improve black life. Believing that bigotry couldNational Association for
the Advancement of Col-
ored People: The oldest,
largest, and best-known
civil rights organization
whose legal and political
efforts resulted in major
successes in desegregat-
ing American society.