Question

Booker T. Washington, who lived from 1856 to 1915, is commonly labeled an accommodationist. What does this mean?

Answer 1

Washington was known as a racial accommodationist (a black person who adapts to the ideals or attitudes of white people) because he promoted the accommodationist approach to civil rights. In a famous 1895 Atlanta address, Washington suggested that African Americans should not agitate for social and political equality in return for the opportunity to acquire vocational training and participate in the economic development of the New South. Booker T. Washington, believed that the quickest way to improve the quality of black life was to forge a social peace with powerful whites, temporarily accepting the continued separation of the races and advocating vocational education as a pragmatic way for blacks to improve their lives.This strategy would lead the white population to see that blacks were not naturally intellectually inferior, as they had been so accused. This, in the long run, could lead to social acceptance and increased equality.