Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address

Context

The 1890s were a difficult decade for African Americans. Many of the gains they had achieved both in securing their political and civil rights and in attaining a measure of physical security gave way to an assault on their rights as citizens and on their personal safety. During Reconstruction three constitutional amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments) and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 had secured African American freedom and equal rights. The military occupation of the former Confederate States and federal legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act) greatly diminished organized violence against Blacks and their white political allies. In the late 1870s and 1880s these gains began to unravel. In the aftermath of the disputed presidential election of 1876, the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South. In 1883 the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights Cases that the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect against discrimination by individuals or businesses, and three years later, for the first time in U.S. history, more Blacks than whites were the victims of lynching.

In the 1890s racial conditions in the United States continued to deteriorate. In Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537 [1896]), the Supreme Court legitimized state-sponsored segregation as long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for Blacks, and in 1898 the Court ruled that literacy tests and other similar methods of restricting the right to vote did not violate the Fifteenth Amendment. The 1890s witnessed more lynchings of Blacks than any other decade in U.S. history. As the decade came to an end, race riots broke out in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); New Orleans, Louisiana (1900); and New York (1900) as violence against Blacks escalated. African Americans struggled to respond to this new wave of discrimination and violence without much success. The federal government, on which African Americans had depended during Reconstruction, was no longer a reliable ally. The Democrats had regained control of southern state governments in the 1870s and won the presidency in 1884 and again in 1892. The Republican Party's commitment to civil rights also had waned. Frederick Douglass, who led the struggle against slavery and was an outspoken advocate of equal rights, died in February 1895, depriving African Americans of their best-known and most effective leader at this very crucial time.

Against this background Atlanta businessmen conceived of an international exposition, a small-scale world's fair, which would highlight the emergence of a “New South,” promote the city and the entire region as a progressive area, and attract new business and investment capital. They hoped to capture some of the positive press coverage and economic benefits that Chicago had received with the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In the spring of 1894 Washington and several other African Americans were asked to join a delegation of prominent southerners to lobby Congress for an appropriation to support the Atlanta Exposition. Congress appropriated the funding, and as planning for the event proceeded, Washington was consulted again on the issue of the “Negro” exhibits. At some point, and after some controversy, exposition officials decided to involve African Americans in the opening ceremonies. On August 23, 1895, about three weeks before opening day, organizers of the exposition asked Washington to represent African Americans at this event.

The decision to involve African Americans so prominently in the exposition was interesting. Two years earlier Black leaders had been unhappy with the way they were treated at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Their exhibits were segregated in Negro buildings, and Blacks felt that as both exhibitors at and visitors to the fair, they had faced broken promises and discrimination. Consequently, a number of African American leaders were reluctant to support the Negro exhibits at this much smaller provincial event. Washington, however, cooperated with the organizers and urged others to do likewise, even though Blacks had to fund their own exhibits and these exhibits would be housed in a separate building. Appreciation of Washington's assistance with Congress and his support of the event brought him to the podium on opening day.