Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address

( 1895 ) Commentary by Cary D. Wintz, Texas Southern University

“‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides.” - Paragraph 5
“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.” - Paragraph 5
“We shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” - Paragraph 8
“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” - Paragraph 10
“No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” - Paragraph 10
“The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.” - Paragraph 10

Booker T. Washington's Speech at the Atlanta Exposition (Library of Congress)

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