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Atlanta Exposition Speech

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Outside Reading Assignment One
“The Atlanta Exposition Speech” by Booker T. Washington, “The Talented Tenth” but W.E.B. DuBois, and “The Negro’s Place in American Life at the Present Day” by T. Thomas Fortune were written during the end of the nineteenth century when African Americans were faced with great challenges on a range of different levels. These documents are very like one another considering they are all addressing the same issues, but I also feel like each of them are unique from one another because of the person who wrote them. Washington focuses more on an industrial education so the blacks can go to school. He has the whites to believe that it will also affect them and make things better for them at the time and that they will …show more content…

DuBois focused on developing education for the African American race and philosophy to develop. This is the second chapter in his book The Negro Problem. He talks about that with an educated group of exceptional leaders, the rest of the African American community would also benefit from this education. DuBois and Washington are rivals during the time that this document was written and DuBois is trying to focus on industrial education, as like Washington did in his speech. DuBois claims “to attempt to establish any sort of a system of common and industrial school training, without first providing for the higher training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the winds (3).” Whereas Washington believed in an industrial education, DuBois believed that African Americans needed a classical education. He seeks to promote, “intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is and of the relation of man to it” (33-4). DuBois, wants blacks to get a classical education so that they would be able to do something with their lives and reach their full potential. He believes they need to do this for their own self to be able to make a living. I feel like this is very important because I do not think the race of someone should affect the way they are treated in society. During this time, they were not always treated fairly, and most did not even get an education. DuBois just wanted what was best for …show more content…

Thomas Fortune has more of gradualism approach to it. He is more focused on getting the attention for the white audience and get the respect from them. Fortune asks, “What is the Negro’s place in American life at the present day?” (2). He says that the answer depends on the point of view of the person and I greatly agree with that statement because I could believe completely differently from the person sitting directly beside me on the situation. Sadly, blacks and whites were not always treated the same way and still aren’t always treated in the same ways today either. Fortune states, “There can be no healthy growth in the life of race or a nation without a self-reliant spirit animating the whole body…” (4). I feel like this statement is something that is important in this speech. It touches on how there is nothing healthy about not having equal rights between whites and blacks. Few blacks can trace back their ancestors as easily as it for whites, because they don’t have an ancestry. This made it very hard on them because, unlike the whites, they would have had nothing to fall back on. Whites just had it a lot easier and honestly still do. People believe that there isn’t any more racism, but it’s very hard for me to believe that after so many years of this occurring for it to just completely stop. In my opinion, giving blacks the rights that they deserve will make things differently because

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