Atlanta Compromise
The Atlanta Compromise refers to a pivotal speech delivered by Booker T. Washington during the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. In his address, Washington advocated for a philosophy of accommodationism, urging African Americans to focus on vocational training and economic self-reliance as a pathway to progress. He emphasized dignity in labor, asserting that African Americans could thrive by excelling in agriculture, mechanics, and other trades, while also encouraging white Southerners to support their educational and economic advancement. Washington's message was intended to foster racial harmony and economic cooperation, suggesting that African Americans should prioritize economic empowerment over immediate demands for social equality.
Despite its initial popularity, the Atlanta Compromise faced significant criticism, particularly from contemporaries like W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that Washington's stance perpetuated social and political inequality. Du Bois contended that economic independence alone would not guarantee full citizenship rights for African Americans, advocating instead for political activism and higher education. The dialogue surrounding the Atlanta Compromise highlights differing strategies within the African American community during a time of intense racial discrimination and societal challenges in the United States.
Atlanta Compromise
Significance: Booker T. Washington’s controversial advocacy of accommodationism had a major influence on African American political and economic strategies.
Booker T. Washington, born a slave on a small Virginia plantation, gained his freedom at the end of the Civil War in 1865. He learned to read by studying spelling books and occasionally attending a school for African American children. In 1872, Washington enrolled at Hampton Institute in Virginia, a technical and agricultural school established for emancipated slaves. After graduation, he taught in Malden, West Virginia, then later returned to Hampton Institute.
In May, 1881, Washington received an invitation to join a group of educators from Tuskegee, Alabama, to help establish a technical and agricultural college for African American students. Tuskegee Institute opened on July 4, 1881, with Washington as its principal. Washington raised funds, acquired land, supervised the construction of buildings, and recruited talented faculty members. Within a decade, the school had gained a national reputation for providing outstanding technical and occupational training for African American students.
In the spring of 1895, Washington was invited to join a planning committee for the forthcoming Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, which would highlight the South’s most recent developments in agricultural technology. Washington was asked to deliver one of the key addresses during the exposition’s opening ceremonies, a speech that would focus on the role of African Americans in the South’s agricultural economy.
The Address
Washington delivered his Atlanta Exposition address on September 18, 1895, to an audience of several thousand listeners. He opened by thanking the directors of the Atlanta Exposition for including African Americans in the event and expressing his hope that the exposition would do more to “cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.”
Washington went on to predict that the exposition would awaken among both white and black southerners “a new era of industrial progress.” He illustrated his point by telling a parable of a ship lost at sea whose crew members were desperate for fresh water. The captain of another ship, hearing the pleas for water by the captain of the distressed vessel, urged the lost sailors, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” When the captain of the lost ship followed that advice, his crew members brought aboard sparkling fresh water from the Amazon River.
Washington then urged his African American listeners to cast down their buckets “in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” He said that African Americans would prosper “in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.” He added that “no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
Washington also told his white listeners to cast down their buckets among the South’s African Americans, “who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.” He encouraged white Southerners to educate African Americans in “head, heart, and hand” so that they would remain “the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.” He asserted that in “all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Washington concluded his speech by expressing his belief that 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.” He emphasized that African Americans must achieve economic self-reliance before they received “all the privileges of the law.”
Washington’s address was enthusiastically received by those present and the press. President Grover Cleveland wrote a congratulatory note. Washington received dozens of invitations to speak around the country and deliver his pragmatic message of economic self-reliance and political accommodationism.
Critics
Nevertheless, critics of Washington’s philosophy soon surfaced, accusing Washington of making an unsatisfactory compromise by accepting an inferior social and political position for African Americans in exchange for economic opportunities. These critics argued that the tools for economic independence alone would not lead African Americans toward full citizenship and that the widespread segregation of and discrimination against African Americans in the United States, especially in the South, was proof of the flaws of Washington’s reasoning.
Perhaps the most eloquent critic of Washington’s message was W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois, who would later found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), asserted that Washington “represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission,” that the ideas expressed in what he called Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” were merely “a gospel of Work and Money” that prompted African Americans to surrender political power, civil rights, and opportunities for higher education. In contrast to Washington, Du Bois advocated that African Americans receive the right to vote, civic equality, and opportunities for higher academic education, as opposed to the kind of occupational training offered at Tuskegee Institute.
Bibliography
Bieze, Michael Scott, and Marybeth Gasman. Booker T. Washington Rediscovered. Baltimore: JHU Press, 2012. Print.
Link, William A. Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War's Aftermath. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013. Print.
Perdue, Theda. Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. Print.
Walker, S. "Booker T. Washington: 'Separatist' in Golden Chains." Black Separatism and Social Reality: Rhetoric and Reason (2013): 56. Print.
Washington, Booker T. My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience. Mineola: Dover, 2014. Print.