W.E.B. Du Bois

The educator Booker T. Washington advocated accommodation rather than a direct challenge to Jim Crow laws, in the hope that white America would gradually change. But a few other black leaders espoused a more confrontational strategy, one that called for an immediate end to racial prejudice. They were led by a young Harvard- and Berlin-educated author and intellectual from Western Massachusetts named W.E.B. Du Bois.