Accommodationism ideology

Accommodationism ideology

Accommodationism refers to an ideology that endorses cooperation and concession to the viewpoint or actions of the opposition. Booker T. Washington and, to a disputable extent, Martin Luther King, Jr., are examples of black leaders who have embraced this concept as a strategy against racial segregation. Competing ideologies developed largely in response to the mass violence that blacks experienced at the hands of whites.

Washington, an influential black leader during the Jim Crow era, is widely recognized as a prominent accommodationist. He promoted black acquiescence to the system of discrimination and disenfranchisement of post-Reconstruction life as a tactic to bring about social and political empowerment. He frequently collaborated with white leaders. However, Washington’s philosophy is believed to have ‘‘increased anti-black violence’’ (Reiland, 3).

In contrast to Washington’s accommodationism, W.E.B. Du Bois and others advocated protest and black self-defense and launched public attacks against segregation and white aggression. Blacks aggressively confronted discrimination and violence in the Brownsville (Texas) Riot of 1906.

Although supporters of the quieter, more gradual process of change via participation in municipal politics believed that the civil rights movement was a radical response, the nonviolent protests of the 1950s and 1960s were fundamentally accommodationistic in their general concession to retaliatory white violence and cooperation with white-dominated institutions.

Frustration with the mounting brutality, particularly during the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer (Mississippi) of 1964, caused young blacks to break away from the philosophy of nonviolence in favor of a more militant and separatist approach.

By the mid-1960s, violence was the widely employed strategy of protest in black ghettos.