Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois comparison
...ure career. In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He was a renowned teacher, reformer and the most powerful black leader of his time. He preached a philosophy of self-help, racial solidarity and accommodation. He urged blacks to accept racial discrimination for the time being and focus on empowering themselves through hard work and material wealth. He believed in education in the crafts, industrial and farming skills mostly. He urged Blacks to gain the virtues of patience, enterprise and prudence. He claimed that this knowledge would help them to gain the respect of whites and would eventually lead to their being fully accepted as citizens and included into all levels of society. W.E.B. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. As a youth, his academic development was spurred through an interest in the situation of African Americans while in high school. He attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At Fisk, DuBois was first exposed to the social system of segregation and the Jim Crow laws. During his summers in Tennessee, he taught in a county school in rural Alexandria, Tennessee and witnessed substantial poverty and hardship. After gradu...