After the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, Booker T. Washington, a former slave who had become the president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and William Edward Burghardt DuBois, a Harvard-educated Massachusetts native born after the Civil War, emerged as leaders in the effort to secure citizenship rights for African Americans. Their goals might have been similar, but their solutions for America's troubling racial problems at the turn of the twentieth century differed greatly.

Washington, who had risen to his position at Tuskegee through hard work, perseverance, and deference to white superiors, advocated a policy of gradualism. According to Washington, African Americans should not concern them selves with immediate political and social equality but instead should concentrate their efforts on achieving economic independence by mastering vital trades such as farming, masonry, carpentry...