THE BIG THREE ASSIGNMENT:  Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey.

Arrange either 3 or 6 groups of students with about 3-6 students in each group.  Give each group one reading from below.  Each group gets only one historical figure to read to begin with..  Take the three sets of statements below and cut them into single strips.  Mix them up.  Place seven into one envelope, seven into a second, and seven into a third envelope.  Students are to receive the statements below in a random fashion, with some statements from each historical figure appearing in each envelope.  Students are to determine if the seven statements they are given belong to the person they are reading about.  When the reading of their figure is done, they are to separate the statements that they believe belong to their historical figure from those that do not belong.  Once the students have separated the statements two students from each group may travel to one of the other two groups.  This means that each of the three groups sends "searchers" out to find if there are any missing statements from their figure at the other tables.  After they analyze the statements remaining from group two, they travel to group three.  When they return, check to see which group has identified all seven statements that belong to their figure.   Have the groups copy the statements of their black leader into their notebooks.  Eventually, all three groups will receive all three readings and copy all the statements that refer to each figure.

Below: Booker T. Washington.  There are seven statements that belong here.

He struggled to have blacks become artisans, business men, to study the trades.

He pushed a broom to earn money.

He sought conciliation with the south.

He was a plantation owner.

His felt that there was honour in all work that one did.

He was the founder of a centre of learning.

He was comfortable with blacks and whites living apart.

Below: W. E. B. Du Bois.  There are seven statements that belong here.

He loved learning and was published in his early teen years.

He was the first black to receive a PhD from Harvard university.

He studied several languages.

He organized a black organization by holding a major meeting in Canada .

He thought that blacks would rebel and would help improve the situation for others in the world.

He felt that whites could help in his organisation.

He helped create an organisation that involved many African heritage countries.

Below: Marcus A. Garvey.  There are seven statements that belong here.

He wanted blacks to return to a colony in Africa early in his life.

He was from the Caribbean .

He preached that blacks could become successful and independent.

He only discovered that blacks were being mistreated when he left his country.

He wanted to keep the black race pure.

He tried to become a great trader.

He encouraged blacks to be proud of who they were.

READINGS

MARCUS GARVEY

Born in St. Ann 's Bay , Jamaica , on August 17, 1887, Marcus Garvey was the youngest of 11 children. Garvey moved to Kingston at the age of 14, found work in a print shop, and became acquainted with the abysmal living conditions of the laboring class. He quickly involved himself in social reform, participating in the first Printers' Union strike in Jamaica in 1907 and in setting up the newspaper The Watchman. Leaving the island to earn money to finance his projects, he visited Central and South America , amassing evidence that black people everywhere were victims of discrimination. He visited the Panama Canal Zone and saw the conditions under which the West Indians lived and worked. He went to Ecuador , Nicaragua , Honduras , Colombia and Venezuala. Everywhere, blacks were experiencing great hardships.

Garvey returned to Jamaica distressed at the situation in Central America, and appealed to Jamaica 's colonial government to help improve the plight of West Indian workers in Central America . His appeal fell on deaf ears. Garvey also began to lay the groundwork of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, to which he was to devote his life. Undaunted by lack of enthusiasm for his plans, Garvey left for England in 1912 in search of additional financial backing. While there, he met a Sudanese-Egyptian journalist, Duse Mohammed Ali. While working for Ali's publication African Times and Oriental Review, Garvey began to study the history of Africa, particularly, the exploitation of black peoples by colonial powers. He read Booker T. Washington's “Up From Slavery”, which advocated black self-help.

In 1914 Garvey organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association and its coordinating body, the African Communities League.

Hundreds would listen to him speak, inspired by his speeches encouraging them to have pride in themselves as Africans. Garvey's message was clear, 'Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will'.

In 1920 the organization held its first convention in New York . The convention opened with a parade down Harlem 's Lenox Avenue . That evening, before a crowd of 25,000, Garvey outlined his plan to build an African nation-state. He was now ready to pursue his most ambitious plans. The UNIA negotiated with the government of Liberia for land which would be made available to repatriate black people from the USA , Caribbean, South and Central America . At first the Liberian government agreed but soon changed its mind before any settlers could arrive.

In New York City his ideas attracted popular support, and thousands enrolled in the UNIA. He began publishing the newspaper The Negro World and toured the United States preaching black nationalism to popular audiences. His efforts were successful, and soon, the association boasted over 1,100 branches in more than 40 countries. Most of these branches were located in the United States , which had become the UNIA's base of operations. There were, however, offices in several Caribbean countries, Cuba having the most. Branches also existed in places such as Panama , Costa Rica , Ecuador , Venezuela , Ghana , Sierra Leone , Liberia , Namibia and South Africa . He also launched some ambitious business ventures, notably the Black Star Shipping Line.

In the years following the organization's first convention, the UNIA began to decline in popularity. With the Black Star Line in serious financial difficulties, Garvey promoted two new business organizations - the African Communities League and the Negro Factories Corporation. He also tried to salvage his colonization scheme by sending a delegation to appeal to the League of Nations for transfer to the UNIA of the African colonies taken from Germany during World War I.

Financial betrayal by trusted aides and a host of legal entanglements (based on charges that he had used the U.S. mail to defraud prospective investors) eventually led to Garvey's imprisonment in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for a five-year term. In 1927 his half-served sentence was commuted, and he was deported to Jamaica by order of President Calvin Coolidge.

Garvey then turned his energies to Jamaican politics, campaigning on a platform of self-government, minimum wage laws, and land and judicial reform. He was soundly defeated at the polls, however, because most of his followers did not have the necessary voting qualifications.

In 1935 Garvey left for England where, in near obscurity, he died on June 10, 1940, in a cottage in West Kensington .

BIOGRAPHY     W. E. B. DUBOIS

This gives an overview of W.E.B. Du Bois' life and contributions to American history and scholarship, and to the struggle for Black Liberation. In the near future, I hope to offer brief working papers on specific aspects of Du Bois' life and work.

Born on February 23, 1868 to Mary Silvina and Alfred Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was raised in a small but long established Black community in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. An avid student, Du Bois was published in the community's newspaper by the age of fourteen. He graduated from high school early and enrolled at Fisk University . Upon receiving his bacccalaureate degree, Du Bois accepted a scholarship at the University of Berlin , where he studied for two years. Following this, he went to Harvard, where he received his doctoral degree, being the first African American to do so. His dissertation, approved in 1895, was published as The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America , 1638-1870. Regarded as a masterpiece of historiography, this work remains an outstanding example of Du Bois' scholarship.

By the turn of the century, Dr. Du Bois was on his way to becoming a career academician. From 1894 to 1896, Du Bois served as professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio . After his term was completed, he accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania , as an assistant instructor teaching sociology. It is of course during this time that he conducted the research for his landmark work, Philadelphia Negro (1899). It was characteristic of the times that Du Bois was not allowed to stay on the segregated campus. In 1896, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, who would later bear him two children, Burghardt (who died at the age of three) and Yolande. From 1897 to 1910, he served as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University . He served as chairman of the sociology department there from 1934 to 1944.

Du Bois did not invest all of his energy in the rigors of academia. He began to carve out a role for himself as a scholar activist. In 1900, he attended and helped organize the First Annual Pan-African Congress; he was involved in subsequent sessions as well, in 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1945.  In 1911 he attended and helped organize the First Universal Races Congress, held in London , England . In 1905, Du Bois and a group of pioneering African American scholars and leaders met to discuss the issue of civil rights.  He felt uncomfortable holding this meeting in America , so he crossed the border to the north.  This group, known as the Niagara Movement, eventually led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. As a founding father of the NAACP, Du Bois also edited the organization's journal, The Crisis, from its inception in 1910 to his initial resignation from the organization in 1934. During that time, he also served as Director of Publicity and Research for the NAACP.   It was Dubois’ belief that whites could be of assistance in this organization, though not in a leadership role.

Following his departure, Du Bois remained a vital intellectual force, continually committed to solving "the twentieth century's problem of the color line." Increasingly, he became involved with progressive socialist thinkers and activists who related the problems of African in terms of capitalist oppression. In his work, Black Folk, Then and Now, Du Bois proposed that the masses of the world proletariat were African and their uprising would elevate the peoples of the world.

Du Bois returned to the NAACP in 1944 as Director of Special Research, but controversy was not far off. Disagreements with the organization's leaders and their political manipulations were followed by antagonistic measures perpetrated by the American government. In 1951, Du Bois was indicted under the McCarran Act, one in a long series of legislation instituted as a means to curtail personal and intellectual freedoms, in retaliation for calling upon the United Nations to hear the crimes of the U.S. government against its own people. With the help of his dedicated followers and various human rights organizations, Du Bois was cleared of the charges levied against him.

Du Bois continued to believe that the crimes of racism and exploitation necessitated the unity of Africans throughout the world. In 1961, he joined the Communist Party USA. That same year, he left the United States with his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, herself a noted writer, and emigrated to Ghana , where he became a full citizen. In 1963, he died peacefully, after ninety-five years of faithfully serving humanity. He was accorded a funeral befitting a head of state by his close friend, the great Ghanian president, Kwame Nkrumah. Dignitaries the world over attended the ceremonies, but in typical fashion, the U.S. government sent no one to pay tribute.

W.E.B. Du Bois remains one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. He produced over 4,000 works and his life and legacy continue to inspire a new generation of men and women to assume the task he so mightily undertook. In his own words: "Peace will be my applause."

By Jennifer Wager, 1994  

Biography: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON  (1856-1915)
By Claudia M. Stolz

        "In all things that are purely social we can be separated as the fingers. Yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
Booker T. Washington, from the Atlanta Speech at the Atlanta Cottons States and International Exhibition, 1895.

Born into slavery in Virginia and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), Booker T. was a boy without a surname until he chose his own upon beginning school at the age of ten. Working in the salt mines, coal mines, and as a janitor to obtain an education, he dedicated his life to promote education as a means for African Americans to achieve economic stability. Unlike Du Bois, his contemporary, Washington did not advocate civil rights, political involvement, or higher education; he advocated betterment through vocational training, a means by which African Americans could provide needed services to society. This supporter of "dignity in labor," graduated from Hampton Institute, taught first at Malden , the school of his childhood in West Virginia , and then at Hampton Institute, both restricted to members of his race. In 1880 the Alabama State legislature passed a bill to establish a school for blacks in Tuskegee , Alabama . Washington was recruited to oversee the development of the school. He accepted the challenge and guided the Normal School for Colored Teachers, as it was first called, to an institution that became an international model for the education of African Americans. Noted scientist George Washington Carver served on the faculty under the leadership of Washington . In 1881, when the school was founded, there existed no land for the school, no buildings, and an appropriation of only $2000 for faculty salaries. He borrowed money to buy an old, rundown plantation, used student labor to erect buildings in exchange for their education, and graduated the first class in 1895. Washington 's success in management resulted in his becoming the most influential African-American leader of his day, a position that passed on to W.E.B. Du Bois after his death in 1915.

In addition to the success of Tuskegee , which he ran from its inception until his death in 1915, Washington was the first man of color to speak from the same stage as white men and women in the South. His speech, called the Atlanta Compromise (1895), pleased many whites during the era of Jim Crow because it called for separate but equal facilities. He accepted segregation on these terms, which offended some other African-American leaders of his time, although he remained the chief spokesman for African Americans until his death. His philosophy appears in his three published works: Up From Slavery (1900), My Larger Education (1911), and Farthest Down (1912). In addition to his accomplishments in education, he founded The National Negro Business League (1900), an association that offered practical advice to black businesspersons. He also advised three presidents, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Taft, on race relations in the United States .

His legacy is far reaching. Today Tuskegee is a university housing 3000 students. No longer restricted to normal and industrial trades, it offers bachelors, masters, and doctoral programs. It is the only campus in the U.S. that is designated a national historic site. Booker T. Washington is buried on campus, and the inscription on a monument in his honor sums up a life dedicated to helping others achieve: "He lifted the veil of ignorance from his people and pointed the way to progress through education and industry."

This essay was submitted by Claudia M. Stolz, a professor at Indiana University East in Richmond , Indiana .