Dubois vs Washington Essay

Divergent Paths to Black Equality Essay Prt2 by laurenmarief

Portfolio entry

         The Booker T Washington and W.E.B Dubois essay entitled “Divergent Paths to Black Equality” was our first big essay of CAP, it was a little bit intimidating at first because it was the first essay and I didn’t really know what to expect from it. The essay was supposed to explain how two black leaders, W.E.B Dubois and Booker T Washington lead the African- American race towards social, political, and economic equality. The path towards African-American equality has always interested me because in a way it is a part of who I am as a person and why I am able to be the person I am now.

            The most important and first part of starting the essay was to complete the research. The research was the most enjoyable and interesting part of writing the essay. It has always been interesting to collect the ideas of so many different authors all from different backgrounds, time periods, and ethnicities, and create your own unbiased ideas based on their ideas. I used a lot of different books that I found around my house which I think set my essay apart from others and made it better because, I wasn’t just using the internet for my resources. My research skills have really grown since I have begun CAP. I have begun to look for research using credible sources and figuring out what information will actually be useful and what information is just filler.  After completing the research I moved onto the writing aspect. I started off by outlining the positives and negatives of Washington’s and Dubois’ ideas on how to reach black equality. Then I focused on how each man would impact the future. After combining all the individual ideas I focused on my own ideas and which man’s idea I thought was more effective.
    Writing an essay like this, and following this process is going to help me in the future just because researching and writing is going to be something that I am going to do throughout my whole life and if I practice good research skills, and good writing skills it will help me throughout high school, college, and whatever line of work I go into.

            I hope that the research paper will be informative to someone and will help people to understand this different ways that Washington and Dubois tried to achieve black equality. If I could do the assignment once more I would try to expand more of my ideas, which was one of the comments that he wrote down. I had strong ideas but as Mr. Grossman noted I didn’t always expand on them. The hardest part of this was condensing my ideas so that it all fit into the constraints but still expanding on them enough so that the reader understands what I am writing about.

            This paper contains a lot of prior knowledge because in seventh grade I did an in depth research project about the North Carolina Sit-In movement, and because it was another civil rights movement it demonstrated some of the ideas that Washington and Dubois talk about in their writing. I was able to connect these two topics to see which of the ideas the sit-in movement put into place, and that helped me to develop some of my ideas about how the two men influenced the civil rights movement.
             I think this paper belongs in my portfolio because it represents what type of work I can do when I really set my mind on it and focus. It also represents a topic that I am largely interested in. Writing this paper taught me that no matter what the topic that you have to try hard, do good research, and focus on every paper you do so that the end result is positive