Agitation for social equality, Washington argued, was but folly, and most Blacks realized the privileges that would come from “constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”Īfrican Americans at 1895 Cotton States Exposition Appealing to white southerners, Washington promised his audience that he would encourage Blacks to become proficient in agriculture, mechanics, commerce, and domestic service, and to encourage them to “dignify and glorify common labour.” Steeped in the ideals of the Protestant work ethic, he assured whites that Blacks were loyal people who believed they would prosper in proportion to their hard work. Washington’s speech responded to the “Negro problem”-the question of what to do about the abysmal social and economic conditions of Blacks and the relationship between Blacks and whites in the economically shifting South.
This speech, along with his 1893 address to the Christian Workers, prompted the exposition’s board of directors to ask Washington to speak at its opening exercises.
Washington pointed out to a congressional committee that since emancipation, Blacks and whites had made advancements in race relations that should be highlighted in an exposition, and he urged federal support for the event, to be held in Atlanta. In the spring of 1895 Washington traveled to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of mostly white Georgians to solicit support from Congress for an exposition on social and economic advances in the South. That audience, comprising northern and southern whites, responded favorably to his speech, in which he advocated vocational-industrial education for Blacks as a means of improving southern race relations. Two years earlier, Washington had spoken in Atlanta during the international meeting of Christian Workers.
Considered the definitive statement of what Washington termed the “accommodationist” strategy of Black response to southern racial tensions, it is widely regarded as one of the most significant speeches in American history. Washington delivered his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. On September 18, 1895, the African American educator and leader Booker T.
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