Leaders of Black America, 1890-1940

Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915

• born a slave in Virginia• graduated from Hampton Institute, 1872• founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama

Ideas :• Vocational Ed• Land ownership• Entrepreneurship• Self-help• Thrift, hard work• Accommodation• Patience Met presidents Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley,

Roosevelt and businessmen Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan

Atlanta Compromise, 1895

• “cast down your buckets where you are”• “in all things purely social, we can be as

separate as the fingers”• do not protest for equal rights or voting• progress will come from evolution, not

violence or revolution

founded National Negro Business League

W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1963

• b. Massachusetts• PhD from Harvard, 1895• Published The Suppression of the African

Slave Trade; The Philadelphia Negro; The Souls of Black Folk; Black Reconstruction

• Co-founder of Niagara movement and NAACP

• Radical activist• Editor of Crisis,

1910-1934

• Resigned from NAACP in 1934, since it was too bourgeois

• Joined Socialist Party, taught at Atlanta U.• Ran for US Senate as Progressive• Joined Communist Party, 1961• Won Lenin Prize, visited USSR and China• Moved to Ghana, gave up US citizenship

“One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Ida Wells Barnett, 1862-1931

• b. Holly Springs, Mississippi• parents died in yellow fever epidemic, 1876• taught school to support her siblings• moved to Memphis in 1880• was arrested for not giving up her seat on a

train to a white man, challenging a Jim Crow law but losing her case in TN Supreme Court

• edited Free Speech, an anti-segregation newspaper which opposed the lynching of black men

• moved to Philadelphia, then New York, then Chicago after threats on her life in Memphis

• married a lawyer named Ferdinand Barnett, spent 35 years working for equal rights for blacks, a law to end lynching, and women’s suffrage

• was a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909

Marcus Garvey, 1887-1940

• b. Jamaica• printer, labor leader, editor• moved to New York City, 1916• founder of Universal Negro

Improvement Association• believed in Black Nationalism and

racial separation

• appealed to lower classes of black Americans, rejecting any notion of integration

• urged a “Back to Africa” movement• edited the New York World, based in Harlem• jailed for mail fraud, selling bogus stock in

his Black Star steamship company• deported to Jamaica in 1927

A. Philip Randolph, 1889-1979

• b. Crescent City, FL• attended City College of New York• edited The Messenger• joined Socialist Party• organized Brotherhood of Sleeping

Car Porters, 1925• pressured FDR to establish the Fair

Employment Practices Commission during WW II