There were two prevailing thoughts about how to best achieve racial equality. Booker T. Washington promoted the notion of accommodation, or the idea that African Americans should accept racial discrimination for a time and work towards building a robust middle class. Washington believed the path to racial equality began with wealth or material prosperity. Washington de-emphasized political rights and emphasized economic parity as the primary objective. He preached the need for self-reliance, hard work, and creating an African American middle class by way of vocational training. Vocational training included the ownership of farms, machine shops, and other craft-related occupations that were in demand. Washington believed that once white America observed the economic progress of African Americans, they would be more likely to accept racial parity.

The second notion countered Booker T. Washington's view that economic parity would ultimately lead to racial equality. This view was promoted by African American leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Their view was that accommodation would serve only to perpetuate racial inequality as the status quo, where the white power structure controlled the majority of wealth and the political structure had no incentive for changing society. Rejecting the notion of accommodation, Du Bois and other African American leaders called for a strategy of agitation and protest. Unlike Washington, Du Bois believed that African Americans needed to build a highly educated group of African Americans called the "Talented Tenth" to agitate and promote change through the legal system by targeting specific issues of inequality.

An ideological split occurred among African American leaders as to which approach would lead to change quickest. The objective of both camps was the same: racial and economic parity with whites. The conflict was in tactic: accommodation or agitation. Uniting the two tactically was made difficult by the generational differences of the leaders and by regional challenges between the racially segregated South and the more tolerant North. Segregation in the North was present, but in the large Northern cities, pockets of racially progressive leaders and ideas allowed for a more racially tolerant attitude toward civil and economic rights for African Americans.