How Did Booker T Washington Promote African American...

The Reconstruction period encouraged many Civil Rights activists to speak out against civil, educational, and social inequality against African Americans. Prior to the Reconstruction era, white Americans did not formally recognize African Americans as citizens of the United States and, thus, categorized African Americans as animals who were incapable of anything outside of generating capitalism for America’s economy. After the Thirteenth Amendment freed the slaves, many African Americans faced boundaries that hindered any higher education prospects and restricted their place in social and political positions. This forced many African Americans into indentured servitude, while many of the other African Americans worked in factories that provided …show more content…
Washington was born in the South under the institution of slavery. As a child, the educational privileges afforded to by whites impressed Washington; he believed that gaining entry into a schoolhouse “would be about the same as getting into paradise” (Washington 7). Many of Washington’s ideologies focus on blacks obtaining some method of industrial education. This is evident in Washington’s struggle for an education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, which was a school that taught African Americans a trade to gain entry into an industry of some sort. Washington believed that “the calls to some industrial occupation are growing more numerous”, which explains why Washington believed that the establishment of trade and vocational schools would uplift the African American race (Washington 83). For Washington, he felt that blacks should take up vocations such as agriculture and architecture since it provides income for blacks and a sense of the mentality of pulling yourself up by your own bootstrap. One of the major critiques about this idea of blacks, specifically African American men, pursuing a vocation and becoming employed in an industry was offered by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, in the Talented Tenth, says, “All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of …show more content…
Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois position for higher education for blacks, Anna Julia Cooper felt that both Washington and Du Bois offered a narrow approach for dealing with race relations for African Americans since it put women in the background of the movement. To start with, Cooper was born into enslavement, just as Washington was born into slavery (Lecture 18 Slide 2). At a young age, her scholastic achievements shined through in her academics, even though the gender binary attempted to place her into tasks as confirmed in the cult of domesticity. Anna Julia Cooper reasoned “that the feminine factor can have its proper effect only through woman's development and education so that she may fitly and intelligently stamp her force on the forces of her day, and add her modicum to the riches of the world's thought” (Cooper 61). Cooper believes that Washington and Du Bois’ narrow approach into only including African American men at the forefront of higher education left out women who could equally and better do what men could; therefore, she believes that African American women should be allowed to participate fully in the journey to higher education. Cooper advances her idea further by acknowledging the fact that certain types of labor is feminized while others are masculinized. “They deny that their education in any way unfits them for the duty of wifehood and maternity or primarily renders these conditions any less attractive to them than to

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