"Atlanta Exposition Address"

The turning point of Booker T. Washington's tenure as African American leader was his address to the Cotton States and International Exposition at Atlanta in 1895. Before the address, referred to as “The Atlanta Compromise Address” or “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” Washington was the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Atlanta;afterward, he was the acknowledged leader of the African American people.

Washington's address essentially ratified the status quo in southern race relations, which had been on a decline since Reconstruction. In the speech he called for African Americans to work for their salvation through economic advancement, and for southern whites to help them on this path. “To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next neighbor, I would say cast down your bucket where you are, cast it down in making friends, in every manly way, of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.” He also downplayed the quest for civil equality in the South, reassuring his white audience: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Economic advancement was more important to African Americans in the South than civil rights, Washington maintained. Once black people had made a success in the world of work, they could expect ultimately to be respected by whites as fellow citizens.

The African American response to the “Atlanta Exposition Address” was initially supportive. But in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois took exception to what he saw as Washington's abandonment of the historic obligation of African American leader ship to demand fair play and justice for their people. Washington's doctrine “has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation.” Growing opposition to the ideas articulated in the “Atlanta Exposition Address” led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909.

To his supporters, Washington was making the best of limited oportunities for African Americans in the South. To his detractors, Washington was abetting the continuous subjugation of African Americans by letting whites believe that African Americans were content to wait for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. As the twentieth century progressed, Du Bois's view prevailed, but for a period of twenty years and more, the views espoused by Washington in the Atlanta Exposition speech generally received widespread approval from African Americans and whites alike.

Bibliography

• August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915, 1963.
• Emma Lou Thornbrough, ed., Booker T. Washington, 1969

Jonathan Silverman