Racial Equality in Education
 |
| Booker T. Washington |
Educator Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. He believed that African-American students should focus on the skills needed for success, and he placed economic security above integration and civil rights. He was chastised by educator W.E.B. Du Bois for not speaking in favor of racial equality. Du Bois was one of the founders of the Niagara Movement that called for an end to racial discrimination. In his 1895 address at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Washington said:
Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.