Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Civil Rights Icons Who Became Bitter Rivals

Despite a Union victory and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, unthinkable in the previous century, a new form of suppression and violence descended on the African American population. “Reconstruction” is employed as a generic term for the period that followed the American Civil War. Suggesting a successful rejuvenation of a war-ravaged South, it lamentably gave way to a resurrection of the same white ruling class and slave-owner mentality, protecting the status quo in the legislatures and courts. The arduous task of overthrowing Jim Crow codes and legislation marked one of the first strides toward the modern struggle for ethnic equality in American society and required nearly a century of struggle. 

That effort spawned a multitude of heroic African American activists, but it is remembered in large part for the work of two iconic African American men of stature. Much like their later counterparts, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, the debate between gradual integration through temporary accommodation and overtly insistent activism was led by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.