  Washington was challenged, publicly and on several fronts, by, among other thinker-activist Black persons, the astute and irrepressible thinker-scholar (and more) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) whose philosophical stances and strategies for transforming the conditions of existence for Black people were substantially different from Washington’s seeming public accommodation to White social hegemony. In the view of some, Washington might be better described as a social separatist and economic and political conservative committed to Black economic independence made even stronger by the predominance of Negroes in some sectors of the national economy resulting in the dependence of White folks on the productivity of Black folks. To this end, for Washington and similar conservative accommodationists, the economic and political hegemony of White people was to be finessed by strategies of seeming acceptance by Black people that masked surreptitious opposition as Colored people pursued economic self-reliance, full political citizenship, and eventual social acceptance that was to be “earned” by forming and exercising good character and responsibility through education for, and the practice of, honest, socially productive, and economically rewarding work.