hin the Afro-American community.
Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and A. Philip
Randolph represented a wide variety of approaches, their ideas forming
the total spectrum of the thrust for remaking the black role in white
society.

Booker T. Washington: The Trumpet of Conciliation

Within a few months of Douglass's death, a new leader was thrust upon the
Afro-American community. Unlike Douglass, who believed in self-assertion,
Booker T. Washington developed a leadership style based on the model of
the old plantation house servant. He used humility, politeness, flattery,
and restraint as a wedge with which he hoped to split the wall of racial
discrimination. His conciliatory approach won the enthusiastic support of
the solid South as well as that of influential Northern politicians and
industrialists, Their backing gained him a national reputation and
provided him with easy access to the press. Members of his own community
were filled with pride to see one of their own treated with such respect
by wealthy and influential leaders of white America. When Theodore
Roosevelt entertained Washington for dinner at the White House, the
Afro-American community was overjoyed. However, some whites believed that
it had been a dangerous breach of etiquette. Nevertheless, there were
those within the Afro-American community who were not enthusiastic about
their new leader. They believed that conciliation was the road to
surrender and not the way to victory.

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery on April 5, 1856. His mother
had been a slave in Franklin County, Virginia. The identity of his white
father remains unknown. After Emancipation the family moved to West
Virginia where it struggled to achieve a livelihood. Young Booker
attended a school for the children of ex-slaves while, at the same time,
holding down a full-time job in the mines. As a courteous, cooperative,
hard-working young man he secured a job cleaning and doing other tasks
around the house of one of the mine owners. This occupation was less
strenuous than working in the mines, and it left him more energy to
pursue his studies, In 1872, with nothing to help him besides his
determination, he traveled and worked his way hundreds of miles to
Hampton Institute. Undaunted by lack of tuition, he insisted that he
could do some useful work to cover his expenses. When he was directed to
clean the adjoining room as a kind of entrance test, his response