Contrasting Approaches to African American Civil Rights: Washington vs. Du Bois

1. Practice Thesis Statements African American Civil Rights DBQ

2. Question: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois represented two different points of view23 on how to secure African American civil rights. Define the problems faced by African Americans at he beginning of the 20th century and identify which method they chose to seek their political and social freedom.

3. At the beginning of the twentieth century the African American people had lost all rights, social and political, that had been gained through the bloodshed of the Civil War. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and “Jim Crow Laws” of the southern states had reduced the African American to a kind of servitude not too much better than slavery. First Booker T. Washington and then W.E.B. DuBois attempted to leverage better conditions for the African American. The passive approach to achieving some rights offered by Booker T. Washington was rejected by African Americans in favor for a demand for complete and total civil rights represented by the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois.

4. At the beginning of the twentieth century the African American people had lost all rights, social and political, that had been gained through the bloodshed of the Civil War. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and “Jim Crow Laws” of the southern states had reduced the African American to a kind of servitude not too much better than slavery. First Booker T. Washington and then W.E.B. DuBois attempted to leverage better conditions for the African American. The passive approach to achieving some rights offered by Booker T. Washington was rejected by African Americans in favor for a demand for complete and total civil rights represented by the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois. Does this thesis paragraph address all major issues of the question? Does it draw a relationship between the two leaders and the core issues? Does it show the need for a choice between contrasting views?

5. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois had the same goal, but different approaches to achieving that goal. Washington seemed to believe that by obtaining economic security and then growing as a people the African American could win the respect of the whites through his success in farming, industry, and the crafts. At that point Washington believed African Americans would gradually earn their civil and social rights. W.E.B. Du Bois believed that the whites of the South would never grant equal rights to the blacks unless African Americans stood up and demanded those rights. In the first decades of the twentieth century African Americans had to decide between the contrasting approaches to gaining their rightful civil and social rights offered by the opposite positions proposed by Washington and Du Bois.

6. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois had the same goal, but different approaches to achieving that goal. Washington seemed to believe that by obtaining economic security and then growing as a people the African American could win the respect of the whites through his success in farming, industry, and the crafts. At that point Washington believed African Americans would gradually earn their civil and social rights. W.E.B. Du Bois believed that the whites of the South would never grant equal rights to the blacks unless African Americans stood up and demanded those rights. In the first decades of the twentieth century African Americans had to decide between the contrasting approaches to gaining their rightful civil and social rights offered by the opposite positions proposed by Washington and Du Bois. Does this thesis paragraph address all major issues of the question? Does it draw a relationship between the two leaders and the core issues? Does it show the need for a choice between contrasting views?