Booker T Washington on Racial Accommodation
Document 21–5: Booker T. Washington on Racial Accommodation
Most progressives showed little interest in changing race relations. Many in fact actively supported white supremacy. Beset by the dilemmas of sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement, poverty, illiteracy, and the constant threat of violence, black southerners had few champions among progressives. Booker T. Washington, perhaps the era’s most celebrated black leader, spelled out a plan of racial accommodation as a path toward progress. In an address to white business leaders gathered at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, Washington outlined ideas that remained at the center of debate among black Americans for decades.
Questions for Reading and Discussion
1. What did Washington mean by “Cast down your bucket where you are”?
2. Washington expressed a distinctive vision of racial equality and progress in his 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.” What were the implications of his vision for
blacks who sought equality and progress? What significance did Washington attach to the words
separate and mutual?
3. In what ways did Washington’s argument appeal to his white audience? Would his speech have been different if he had been addressing a black audience? If so, how and why?
4. To what extent did Washington’s speech exemplify the dilemmas of African Americans in the
Progressive Era?
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