GRADUALIST: The gentle Booker T. Washington (1856Ð1915) thought it folly to agitate against the ruling of the Supreme Court. He wanted blacks to emulate his own incredible rise from birth in a slave hut to founder of the Tuskegee Institute for vocational training. He counseled them to live with Jim Crow while they won economic independence by patience, thrift and the acquisition of practical skills. "In all things that are purely social," he said in a famous speech in 1895, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
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