Historian+8

The Harlem Renaissance How the Renaissance Began The Harlem Renaissance is the term applied to the movement of African Americans from the Southern to the Northern cities during the 1920s and 1930s. the time period coincided with black migration to the northern cities to look for employment opportunities that became available after World War I.      []

1868 -1963
=== Children learn more from what you are than what you teach. ===   —WEB Dubois, 1897

**W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Dubois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was one of the most influential black leaders of the first half of the 20th Century. Dubois shared in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or**  NAACP   **, in 1909. He served as**  __its director__   **of research and editor of its magazine, "Crisis," until 1934.

Dubois was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from**  Harvard University   **in 1896. Between 1897 and 1914 Dubois conducted numerous studies of black society in America, publishing 16 research papers. He began his investigations believing that social science could provide answers to race problems. Gradually he concluded that in a climate of virulent racism, social change could only be accomplished by agitation and protest.

At the turn of the century Dubois had been a supporter of black capitalism. Throughout his career he moved steadily to the political left. By 1905 he had been drawn to socialist ideas and remained sympathetic to**  __Marxism__   **throughout his life. Dubois acted in support of integration and equal rights for everyone regardless of race, but his thinking often exhibited a degree of black separatist-nationalist tendencies. In 1961 Dubois became completely disillusioned with the United States. He moved to Ghana, joined the Communist Party, and a year later renounced his**  __American Citizenship__   **.

August 27, 1963, on the eve of the March On Washington, Dubois died in Accra, Ghana, shortly after becoming a Ghanan citizen.** **http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/dubois.html**

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Hale's Ford, Virginia, reportedly on April 5, 1856. After emancipation, his family was so poverty stricken that he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines beginning at age nine. Always an intelligent and curious child, he yearned for an education and was frustrated when he could not receive good schooling locally. When he was 16 his parents allowed him to quit work to go to school. They had no money to help him, so he walked 200 miles to attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia and paid his tuition and board there by working as the janitor. Dedicating himself to the idea that education would raise his people to equality in this country, Washington became a teacher. He first taught in his home town, then at the Hampton Institute, and then in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. As head of the Institute, he traveled the country unceasingly to raise funds from blacks and whites both; soon he became a well-known speaker. In 1895, Washington was asked to speak at the opening of the Cotton States Exposition, an unprecedented honor for an African American. His Atlanta Compromise speech explained his major thesis, that blacks could secure their constitutional rights through their own economic and moral advancement rather than through legal and political changes. Although his conciliatory stand angered some blacks who feared it would encourage the foes of equal rights, whites approved of his views. Thus his major achievement was to win over diverse elements among Southern whites, without whose support the programs he envisioned and brought into being would have been impossible. In addition to Tuskegee Institute, which still educates many today, Washington instituted a variety of programs for rural extension work, and helped to establish the National Negro Business League. Shortly after the election of President William McKinley in 1896, a movement was set in motion that Washington be named to a cabinet post, but he withdrew his name from consideration, preferring to work outside the political arena. He died on November 14, 1915. http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/washington_b.htm