In the years before Booker T. Washington’s freedom began, he was a young boy living on a plantation with his mother. In his autobiography, Up From Slavery, he mentions his early yearn for education saying “I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.” After the abolition of slavery, Washington’s family moved to West Virginia and he began to work in salt and coal mines. His stepfather’s decision to make him work instead of study disappointed him. It “seemed

Washington’s biggest critic was another black intellectual man named W.E.B DuBois. At first a supporter of Washington, DuBois eventually called his address in Atlanta, the “Atlanta Compromise.” Dubois wrote against Washington in his book Souls of Black Folks saying “To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions… But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinction, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds… we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.” Dubois believed in social equality, no compromise. He had a theory called the “The Talented Tenth” where the best way to defeat racism was for the core educated, intelligent blacks to lead the fight against it. In order to accomplish this he found the Niagara Movement in 1905 which lead to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Although both DuBois and Washington focused on education as way to overcome the hardships of African Americans, their ideas of how to achieve it differed.

to cloud my every ambition,” Washington stated (Gates, 501). While at work in the coal mine one day he heard about a school for African American students where he could work for his room and board. At that moment he knew nothin

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