ped the idea of Blacks becoming skilled tradesmen as a useful stepping-stone toward respect by the white majority and eventual full equality. Washington worked his way through Hampton Institute and helped found the Tuskegee Institute, a trade school for blacks. His essential strategy for the advancement of American Blacks was for them to achieve enhanced status as skilled tradesmen for the present, then using this status as a platform from which to reach for full equality later. Significantly, he argued for submission to the white majority so as not to offend the power elite. Though he preached appeasement and a "hands off" attitude toward politics, Washington has been accused of wielding imperious power over "his people" and of consorting with the white elite.
             William Edward Burghardt DuBois, on the other hand, was more of an idealist. DuBois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, just after the end of the Civil War and the official end of slavery. A gifted scholar, formal education played a much greater role in DuBois's life than it did in Washington's. After becoming a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fisk and Harvard, he was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. DuBois wrote over 20 books and more than 100 scholarly articles on t
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