1 gen 1895 anni - Booker T. Washington delivers Atlanta Compromise Address

Descrizione:

n 1895 address by Booker T. Washington that urged whites and African Americans to work together for the progress of all. Delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, the speech was widely interpreted as approving racial segregation.

Washington gained national fame in 1895 with his Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. For the exposition’s white organizers, the racial “compromise” was inviting Washington to speak at all. It was a move intended to show racial progress in the South. Washington, in turn, delivered an address that many interpreted as approving racial segregation. Stating that African Americans had, in slavery days, “proved our loyalty to you,” he assured whites that “in our humble way, we shall stand by you … ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours.” The races could remain socially detached: “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.” Washington urged, however, that whites join him in working for “the highest intelligence and development of all.”

Whites greeted this address with enthusiasm, and Washington became the most prominent black leader of his generation. His soothing rhetoric and style of leadership, based on avoiding confrontation and cultivating white patronage and private influence, was well suited to the difficult years after Reconstruction. Washington believed that money was color-blind: whites would respect economic success. He represented the ideals of millions of African Americans who hoped education and hard work would erase white prejudice. That hope proved tragically overoptimistic. As the tide of disfranchisement and segregation rolled in, Washington would come under fire from a younger generation of race leaders who argued that he accommodated too much to white racism.

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