Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Washington's Atlanta Exposition Address was presented in the auditorium on the exposition grounds. The auditorium was packed, mostly with whites, but there was also a segregated Negro section. Washington was one of two Blacks seated on the stage, but he was the only one to speak. The speech itself was brief. In written form it is eleven paragraphs; Washington delivered it in about ten minutes.

In the first paragraph Washington notes the significance of the occasion. First, he emphasizes the significance of African Americans to the South—“One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race”—and observes that no enterprise for the development of the South that ignores that element of the population will “reach the highest success.” In this sentence, Washington introduces the major theme of his address: that the destinies and well-being of African American southerners and white southerners are inextricably linked. He returns to this theme again and again. Washington concludes this paragraph by praising the leaders of the exposition for recognizing the “value and manhood of the American Negro” throughout the planning and staging of the event. This statement is often viewed as obsequious; however, the role afforded African Americans, from the lobbying efforts, the planning of the Black exhibits, and Washington's participation in the opening ceremonies, contrasted considerably with the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 as well as other previous expositions.

The second paragraph contains the type of language that most irritated Washington's critics. After the rather serious opening, Washington feeds negative racial stereotypes when he essentially apologizes for the ignorance and inexperience that led newly emancipated Blacks to make unwise choices, seeking political office rather than land or industrial skills and prizing political activity over entrepreneurship. Critics cite this paragraph as evidence that Washington acquiesced to white efforts to deprive Blacks of their political rights. In truth, Washington consistently opposed both publically and privately the disenfranchisement of southern Blacks. However, Washington did feel that Blacks should place greater emphasis on their economic betterment.

The third paragraph centers on one of Washington's best-known homilies. This is the story of the ship lost at sea, its crew dying of thirst and sending out a desperate cry for water, only to be told, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Washington uses this story to admonish the Blacks in his audience to “cast down your bucket where you are,” that is, to remain in the South rather than attempt to better their condition in a “foreign land.” Washington consistently advised African Americans not to follow the Exodusters west, join the trickle to northern cities that twenty years later became the Black migration, or follow those who advocated emigration to a Black-governed country, such as Haiti or Liberia. As discrimination and racial violence intensified, many considered Washington's advice to be misguided, binding Blacks to a new slavery. Washington, however, argued that African Americans must work with their white neighbors—but without surrendering their dignity: “‘Cast down your bucket where you are’;—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of all the people of all races by whom we are surrounded” (emphasis added).

The next paragraph continues this argument. Still addressing the African Americans in the audience, Washington continues: “Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” Here Washington is laying out his economic agenda. While he is usually cited for promoting only low-skilled, working-class, and agricultural labor for Blacks, here he is quite specific—his list of occupations includes commerce and the professions. Washington acknowledges that initially, lacking skills, capital, and education, most Blacks will survive by the labor “of [their] hands,” and he warns Blacks not to denigrate the dignity and importance of this type of work. He also warns Blacks not to sacrifice the habits of thrift and the accumulation of property and real wealth by conspicuous consumption and the superficial trappings of opulence. He notes that “there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem,” not to criticize poets but to recognize the importance of farmers. Finally, he warns Blacks not to let discrimination and injustice blind them to the opportunities that surround them. In other words, if they focus only on their victimization, they will not succeed.

In paragraph 5, Washington shifts his focus to the white portion of his audience. Very carefully he lays out what white southerners must do, always recognizing that if he pushes too hard or too far he will fail and that failure would jeopardize Tuskegee and possibly his own safety. He begins with the very gentle phrase, “were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race”; then he tells white southerners to “‘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.” Washington is telling white southerners to employ African Americans, not the immigrants who are pouring into the country from southern and eastern Europe; his reference to “strikes and labour wars” refers to the turmoil of recent clashes between unions and factory owners, such as the Homestead Strike (1892) among steelworkers and the Pullman Strike (1894) of factory workers. In his reference to Black fidelity and love being tested, he is referring to the Civil War and reminding whites that at the time they were most vulnerable, with most men off at war, Blacks did not strike down the families they left behind. In discussing the contributions of Blacks to the development of the South, Washington refers to both tilling the fields and building the cities, and for the future he depicts Blacks buying land, making waste areas blossom, and running factories. Throughout this section Washington softens his message with references to the African American people as law-abiding, unresentful, loyal, and faithful, and he reminds his audience that Blacks have nursed whites' children, cared for their aged, and mourned their dead.

Washington concludes paragraph 5 with his most famous statement: “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.” This sentence is at the heart of the criticism of Washington and the Atlanta Exposition Address. Looked at out of context, it seems to acquiesce to “separate but equal” segregation. However, the sentence was spoken in a context that leaves the meaning less clear. Immediately preceding it, Washington spoke of Blacks “interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one,” picking up the theme introduced in the first paragraph that the destinies of Black and white southerners are intertwined.

In the very short sixth paragraph, Washington continues to discuss the connectedness of Blacks and whites, observing that the security of both races requires the “highest intelligence and development of all” and urging whites to invest in the advancement of African Americans for the betterment of all.

In paragraph 7, Washington breaks the narrative and quotes from the poem “At Port Royal,” written by the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier in 1862 to celebrate the November 1861 Union victory over the South and the occupation of the Port Royal area on the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. This battle was significant because the Union army liberated a number of slaves. It was one of the earliest steps towards emancipation. Quoting the most celebrated abolitionist poet to a largely white audience in Atlanta was very daring of Washington. Washington's message is one of oppressor and oppressed, bound together, confronting one fate. It is very likely that most whites in the audience knew the poem.

For those in the audience who might not know the poem or understand its message, Washington repeats it in very clear, unambiguous language in paragraph 8. Either Blacks and whites cooperate for the betterment of the South, or Blacks will work against whites and retard progress; either Blacks will constitute one-third of the South's “intelligence and progress” and one-third of its “business and industrial prosperity,” or “we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” Washington threatens white southerners with economic and social catastrophe unless they are willing to work with Blacks and allow Blacks to share appropriately in southern progress and development.

After stating this grim warning, Washington turns to humor to defuse the tension. He begins paragraph 9 with a reference that caters to the white stereotype of Blacks as petty thieves—much to the dismay of his critics. The rest of the paragraph is conciliatory. Washington describes the advances and accomplishments that African Americans had made in the thirty years since emancipation and the assistance from southern states and northern philanthropists that made this progress possible.

Paragraph 10 consists of three often-quoted sentences. In the first Washington asserts that “agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly” but that progress toward equality will result from “severe and constant struggle” rather than from “artificial forcing.” Here again Washington is ambiguous, on the one hand denouncing agitation and on the other advocating prolonged struggle. The difference may lie in the term social equality, which some scholars suggest southerners equated with intermarriage. The second sentence reflects Washington's conviction that economic prosperity would erase racial prejudice. Washington ends this paragraph by asserting that at the current time, it is more important that Blacks achieve the right to work in a factory than to buy a seat in the opera house. Again Washington expresses his belief that in the short term, economic priority should be the highest priority for African Americans. His critics accused him of again accepting segregation.

In the final paragraph, Washington ends where he began, praising the organizers of the exhibition and observing the tremendous progress Blacks and whites have made, the former starting as slaves with nothing and the latter coming out of a war in which they lost everything. He again links the destiny of the two races and adds a religious component. It is God who has laid before the South the task of creating a just society, free of “sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions.” If whites, with the support of Blacks, resolve this problem, they will bring into the South a “new heaven and a new earth,” a reference drawn from Revelation 21:1. Left unspoken is the alternative described in Revelation 21:8 and known to most listeners. The failure to create a just society (a new heaven and a new earth) will be a fate shared by all southerners—the “lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”