[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Future of African Americans
In the early years of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey developed competing visions for the future of African Americans. Civil War Reconstruction failed to assure the full rights of citizens to the freed slaves. By the 1890s, Ku Klux Klan terrorism, lynchings, racial-segregation laws, and voting restrictions made a mockery of the rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which were passed after the Civil War.
The problem for African Americans in the early years of the 20th century was how to respond to a white society that for the most part did not want to treat black people as equals. Three black visionaries offered different solutions to the problem.Booker T. Washington argued for African Americans to first improve themselves through education, industrial training, and business ownership. Equal rights would naturally come later, he believed. W. E. B. Du Bois agreed that self-improvement was a good idea, but that it should not happen at the expense of giving up immediate full citizenship rights. Another visionary, Marcus Garvey, believed black Americans would never be accepted as equals in the United States. He pushed for them to develop their own separate communities or even emigrate back to Africa.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1856. Early on in his life, he developed a thirst for reading and learning. After attending a elementary school for African-American children, Washington walked 500 miles to enroll in Hampton Institute, one of the few black high schools in the South. Working as a janitor to pay his tuition, Washington soon became the favorite pupil of Hampton's white founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Armstrong, a former Union officer, had developed a highly structured curriculum, stressing discipline, moral character, and training for practical trades.......
