Wikipedia's page on W.E.B. Du Bois

When sticks and stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is largely one of determined opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms,—a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion.

Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

To make here in human education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent—of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium—has been there, as it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.

Of the Training of Black Men

The literary essay shares some of the qualities of narrative prose, and some of the qualities of oral speech. Among the features worth noting: grand figures of speech, extended metaphors, parallel structure, echoes, repetition, and contrast.

Du Bois is known, among other things, for his articulation of "Double Consciousness" -- the internalized otherness that African Americans always feel when they look at themselves.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. ("Of Our Spiritual Strivings," in The Souls of Black Folk.)

While Washington's advocacy of industrial education, giving practical jobs that the majority could use on a daily basis, Du Bois argued that the way to a better future was to identify the "talented tenth" -- that is, the top tier in terms of intellectual capacity and performance, in order to improve the quality of leadership that would carry the other nine-tenths. In the article I linked above, Du Bois notes that Washington relies heavily on the services of college-educated men and women, despite the fact that his emphasis on meeting the needs of the 90% leads to decreased public awareness of (or interest in) the education of the 10%.