Atlanta Exposition Address

Summary

On 18 September 1895 the Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta, a fair meant to display the industrial recovery of the South thirty years after the Civil War. Its organizers, who had included a Negro Building among the exhibits, invited Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to speak at the opening ceremonies. No Black speaker had addressed so prominent a mixed Southern audience on such an occasion, and Washington later wrote that he felt the weight of both races watching him. He opens by noting that one third of the South's people are Black and that no plan for the region's welfare can succeed without them. He thanks the managers for their recognition and admits that in the first years of freedom his people began at the top, seeking office before land and skill. The center of the speech is a parable. A ship lost at sea signals a passing vessel for water and is told four times to cast down its bucket where it is; the captain finally does, and draws up fresh water from the mouth of the Amazon. Washington applies the lesson twice. To Black Southerners tempted to emigrate, he says to make friends with their white neighbors and to cast down their buckets in farming, trades, commerce, domestic service, and the professions, learning the dignity of labor. To white Southerners looking to immigrant workers, he says to cast down their buckets among the Black people they already know, and to educate them in head, hand, and heart. He then offers the image that became the speech's best-known line: in purely social matters the races may be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in mutual progress. He warns that the South's Black population will either help pull the load upward or drag it down, describes thirty years of progress with gratitude for Northern and Southern help, and calls agitation for social equality folly, while affirming that the full protection of the law should be theirs. He ends with a prayer for justice, obedience to law, and a new heaven and a new earth in the South. The audience cheered, and President Grover Cleveland wrote to congratulate him. W. E. B. Du Bois later named the speech the Atlanta Compromise and challenged its program in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Top Lessons

• Beginning where you are

  The parable of the bucket teaches that help is often nearer than we think, and that progress begins with the work at hand rather than in a distant place. Washington applies this to a people only thirty years out of slavery, urging the patient building of skill, property, and character.

• The dignity of labor

  Washington insists that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem and that a people must learn to put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. This conviction shaped Tuskegee, where students built the buildings in which they studied.

• Strategy and principle in a hard time

  Washington spoke to a white Southern audience as segregation and disfranchisement were spreading. He chose to stress economic partnership and to set aside the demand for social equality, while still claiming the full rights of the law. Du Bois answered that rights deferred would not be granted. Students can weigh both men's reasoning within their circumstances.

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