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

founded National Negro Business League 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