Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address

Audience

The initial audience that Washington addressed was a few thousand southerners gathered in Atlanta for the opening of the exposition. Louis Harlan, Washington's principal biographer, describes the auditorium as “packed with humanity from bottom to top”; outside were “thousands more … unable to get in” (Harlan, 1972, p. 215). Still, this was a relatively small but important audience. The majority were white southerners, a very difficult audience for Washington to face. In 1895 few white southerners would have tolerated being lectured to by a Black man. Washington had to make his points both gently and diplomatically without surrendering his dignity or his convictions. Also present in audience were Black southerners, fewer in number, attracted to the auditorium by the unusual opportunity to see a Black man address an audience of prominent whites. Washington could also expect that his words, at least in part, would be reported throughout the Black community.

What Washington did not anticipate was the much larger national audience that his speech would reach. Within in a few days his Atlanta Exposition Address was reported in whole or in part in newspapers across the country. Washington would quickly become the most widely known African American in the country, and passages from his speech would become fixed in popular culture and American memory.