In the fall of 1895, Booker T. Washington gave one of the opening addresses for the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His speech came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise. In his address, Washington urged African Americans to give up political and voting rights and, instead, work to achieve economic equality with white southerners. He proposed doing this through agricultural and industrial training.
The following excerpt is from Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, which includes the address as originally delivered.
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When I arose to speak, there was considerable cheering, especially from the coloured people. As I remember it now, the thing that was uppermost in my mind was the desire to say something that would cement the friendship of the races and bring about hearty cooperation between them.
. . . To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating [making] friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbour, I would say: “Cast [set 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.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world. . . . Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands. . . . No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
[During this period, many southerners wanted immigrants to take the place of African Americans in the workforce. Booker T. Washington appeals to southerners not to do this.] As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives if need be, in defense of yours. . . . 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.
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From Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, 1901.
