Essential Question: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois offered several strategies for addressing the problems of poverty and discrimination faced by black Americans in the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Evaluate the appropriateness of each of these strategies in the historical context in which each was developed. After the period in which big business ran the country for its own benefit, middle class activists began to rise up against these unjust actions. The new era was known as the Progressive Era. Not only were progressives fighting for the restoration of social equality, but others, such as muckrakers, were revealing the inadequate conditions in the factories. Because of these events, African Americans were influenced and began to seek their civil rights and equality in a society dominated by the white population. The South, one of the main areas that limited the rights held by Africans, began to increase the number of Jim Crow laws. To address this repression, many African Americans, including Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, fought against discrimination and fought for civil rights to make their race equal in social status. Although both men had been driven throughout their careers to achieve the same outcomes—enabling African Americans to have full citizenship—their approaches to achieving them varied. While W. E. B. Du Bois employed a philosophy that involved combative tactics to gain equal social and political rights, Booker T. Washington thought that Africans should work vigorously for economic equality before seeking citizenship. An example of W. E. B. Du Bois's more militant ways included the Niagara Movement that occurred on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls... midway through the paper... the story noted that Washington saw more progress than Du Bois. The reason for this was that Washington followed a morality of hard work that most people understood, whether African-American or white. By appealing and advancing his beliefs, he received charitable help from whites to support the development of the Tuskegee Institute and the recognition that Africans deserved civil rights. The Du Bois Crisis, “The Niagara Declaration of Principles Movement,” and The Souls of the Black People were known to many, but not in the way he hoped. Many opposed his views as too radical and demanding, resulting in Du Bois attacking Washington as he lost faith in his own works. For these reasons, the tactics adopted by Washington to obtain civil rights for African Americans were extremely suitable for the late 19th and early 20th centuries.