African Americans responded to discrimination and prejudice in different ways. Some refused to put up with it. One black man, T. Thomas Fortune, insisted that African Americans should not ask white Americans for their rights, but demand it of them. Another named Bishop Henry M. Turner even argued that blacks should simply move back to Africa, as America would never offer them full equality.
On the other hand, some African American leaders took the opposite approach. Booker T. Washington, for example, urged his fellow blacks to accept segregation for the time being. If they were patient, he argued, eventually their hard work and clean living would prove to whites that blacks were deserving of better treatment and equal citizenship.
If you had been an African American during this period, which sort of leader do you think you would have followed?