The Negro Problem

by Booker T. Washington, W E DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar

Overview

This is a collection of seven essays by prominent Black American writers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Booker T. Washington, edited by Washington himself. It was first published in 1903, covering topics as law, education, disenfranchisement, and Black Americans' place in American society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609423896
Publisher:	Iap - Information Age Pub. Inc.
Publication date:	08/06/2018
Pages:	102
Sales rank:	685,838
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.21(d)

About the Author

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 18, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to multiple presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community and of the contemporary black elite.[1] Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the "Atlanta compromise", which brought him national fame. He called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South.
Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term goal of building the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. With his own contributions to the black community, Washington was a supporter of Racial uplift. But, secretly, he also supported court challenges to segregation and restrictions on voter registration.[2]
Black activists in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise, but later disagreed and opted to set up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to work for political change. They tried with limited success to challenge Washington's political machine for leadership in the black community, but built wider networks among white allies in the North.[3] Decades after Washington's death in 1915, the civil rights movement of the 1950s took a more active and progressive approach, which was also based on new grassroots organizations based in the South, such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Table of Contents

I Industrial Education for the Negro Booker T. Washington

II The Talented Tenth W.E. Burghardt DuBois

III The Disfranchisement of the Negro Charles W. Chesnutt

IV The Negro and the Law Wilford H. Smith

V The Characteristics of the Negro People H.T. Kealing

VI Representative American Negroes Paul Laurence Dunbar

VII The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day T. Thomas Fortune