Essays on Atlanta Exposition

ABSTRACT

In the years 1870 to 1900 the U.S. had become the leading industrial power in the world, with more railroad mileage and a larger steel industry than the rest of the world combined. As it became an urban, industrial society with a rapidly growing population and millions of immigrants, it faced new social and economic problems, which were addressed by an expanding government at all levels. In the Progressive Era of 1900-20, some limited gains were made in the regulation of capitalism, as well as granting voting rights to women, passing constitutional amendments for an income tax and the direct election ...

Booker T. Washington was willing to accommodate to social and political inequality for blacks in favor of a policy of gradualism and improvement through education and economic status, while W.E.B. DuBois insisted on full civil, political and economic equality for blacks. As Washington informed the white audience at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, blacks should be willing to forgo opposition to segregation or demands for civil rights and voting rights in favor of education, training and advancement in the commercial world. His own Tuskegee Institute was the model for his version of industrial and agricultural training for blacks, and despite ...

Two Views on African American Advancement

The extract written by Dubois is clearly intended as a reply and a riposte to Washington’s account of his Atlanta Exposition Address and the responses to it. Indeed, he systematically attacks Washington’s ideas and puts forward a radically different vision of how African Americans should be educated and how their political and social integration should proceed. Overall I feel that Dubois is fair to Washington. He calls him “ a useful and earnest man” (Dubois, 774) and states that in the North of the United States the initial reaction to Washington’s Exposition Address was, in some African American circles, that ...