Booker T Washington Du Dubois Analysis

Reading Du Bois’s essay might give the impression of some form of utopia as it fails to delve deeper into the struggles that undoubtedly helped make black Durham one of the most well-known and successful black communities in the nation. Historian Leslie Brown highlights what she perceives to be some of the limitations of Du Bois text. In describing the upbuilding of Durham, she asserts this could be construed as the methods African Americans utilised in their journey out of slavery. She agreed with Du Bois that blacks needed to use their labour and diverse resources to achieve success. However, she claimed the black institutions created in Durham highlighted differences of gender and class, as well as the cohesions of race and community. In other words while blacks worked both collectively and separately on upbuilding, individuals faced their own sets of challenges. She asserts that the main players of the Durham Group created what southern whites detested - a successful black society, while at the same time they accommodated …show more content…
It would seem a fair assessment to contend that despite this, the evidence of how around 5,000 African-Americans, their determination and spirit, fearlessly defied societal norms and encouraged enterprise and hard work. This was a fact that both Booker T Washington and Du Bois – despite their political differences – wholly agreed on, that Durham, North Carolina, was the “city of cities to look for the prosperity of Negroes.” The reason for Du Bois visit to Durham and his subsequent essay was to understand Durham’s solution to the race problems. He ended his essay with the following conclusion - “the significance of the rise of a group of black people to the Durham height and higher, means not a disappearance but, in some respects, an accentuation of the race

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