In his 1900 autobiography, Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: "I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression on me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise." The vision of that schoolroom and the idea that learning was "paradise" would provide lifelong inspiration for Washington. He is, perhaps, best remembered as the head of the world famous Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, founded in 1881, and known today as Tuskegee University. His driving personality led a group of businessmen to ask if he would take the lead in creating the school. The Tuskegee Institute was the embodiment of Washington's over-arching belief that African Americans should eschew political agitation for civil rights in favor of industrial education and agricultural expertise. Washington believed that once it was apparent to whites that blacks would "contribute to the market place of the world," and be content with living "by the production of our hands," the barriers of racial inequality and social injustice would begin to erode. Those words were spoken on September 18, 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta, Georgia, known as the Atlanta Exposition. Washington's speech stressed accommodation rather than resistance to the segregated system under which African Americans lived. He renounced agitation and protest tactics, and urged blacks to subordinate demands for political and equal rights, and concentrate instead on improving job skills and usefulness through manual labor. "Cast down your buckets where you are," he exhorted his fellow African Americans in the speech. Throughout his adult life, Washington played a dominant role in the African American community and worked tirelessly to improve the lives of blacks, many of whom were born in slavery. He gained access to presidents, top national leaders in politics, philanthropy and education. President William McKinley visited the Tuskegee Institute and lauded Washington, promoting him as a black leader who would not be perceived as too "radical" to whites. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to the White House. A picture was published of the occasion, which angered many whites who were offended by the idea of a Black American being entertained in the White House. Washington was never invited to the White House again, although Roosevelt continued to consult with him on racial issues. Washington also associated with some of the richest and most powerful businessmen of the era. His contacts included such diverse and well-known industrialists as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Julius Rosenwald, enlisting their support to help raise funds to establish and operate thousands of small community schools and institutions of higher education for the betterment of African Americans throughout the South. However, by the early 1900s, other African Americans, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, were becoming national figures and speaking out about the lack of progress African Americans were making in American society. Du Bois, initially an ally of Washington's, was particularly vocal about what he believed was Washington's acceptance of black's unchanging situation and began to refer to Washington's Atlanta speech as the "Atlanta Compromise" — a label that remains to this day. The criticism by Du Bois and others diminished Washington's stature for some in the black community. They denounced his surrender of civil rights and his stressing of training in crafts, some obsolete, to the neglect of a liberal arts education. Washington's public position of accommodation to segregation came in conflict with increasing calls from African Americans and liberal whites for more aggressive actions to end discrimination. Opposition centered in the Niagara Movement, founded in 1905, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an interracial organization established in 1909. Yet there was another side to Washington. Although outwardly conciliatory, he secretly financed and encouraged lawsuits to block attempts to disfranchise and segregate African Americans. Since his death in 1915, historians have discovered voluminous private correspondence that shows that Washington's apparent conservatism was only part of his strategy for uplifting his race. Even in death, as in life, Washington continues to engender great debates as to his true legacy. He was a founder of Tuskegee Institute, building it into one of the premiere universities for African Americans at a time when few alternatives were available, and he raised considerable funds for hundreds of other schools in the South for blacks. Yet, his 'Atlanta Compromise' speech stressed the need for blacks to accept the status quo and focus on manual labor as a way to economic development. In contrast, Du Bois believed that the "object of all true education is not to make men carpenters; it is to make carpenters men." Washington's position that "the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly," stands in stark contradiction to his covert support of legal challenges to discrimination. It is difficult to calculate the negative impact that flowed from Washington's unwillingness to speak out publically against lynching and other acts of violence against blacks at the time — even with his extraordinary access to presidents and other prominent whites in the nation. These two giants — Washington and Du Bois — underscore the fact that there was not a single linear path to achieving racial equality in the nation. The struggle required African Americans to both battle and accommodate the realities of segregation and discrimination to help future generations more fully realize the promise of America.
Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915) Speech to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition Atlanta, Georgia - October 18, 1895 One of the first African American speeches ever recorded in sound was one of great significance: Booker T. Washington's address at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. The fact that a black man was invited to speak to this all-white Southern audience was itself a historic event. Washington's words sparked a fundamental debate over race relations that burned for decades to follow: should black people concentrate on a gradual accumulation of skills and economic security or demand the full and immediate rights simply due them as American citizens? Booker T. Washington was one of the last major black leaders born in slavery. He epitomized the American ideal of a self-made man, escaping poverty through relentless work and pursuit of education, and achieving international fame. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. The black-run institution was designed to prove the worth of African Americans through self-improvement, education, moral uplift, and skilled labor. The students made the bricks for their new schools by hand. Washington became a national figure with his Atlanta speech. He urged African Americans to discard Reconstruction-era notions of social equality. Instead, he argued, most Southern blacks should pursue a modest, methodical program of self-improvement through service and labor. Washington beseeched whites to recognize how valuable this loyal and unresentful workforce could be. He climaxed the speech with a promise that many whites - uneasy about the threat that black ambitions posed to their supremacy - found appealing: whites and blacks could simultaneously live together and apart. "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." The applause was described as thunderous, the scene extraordinary. Former slaveholders and Confederate officers gripped the hand of the man born in slavery. White women tossed flowers to him.1 Historian David Levering Lewis counts Washington's Atlanta Exposition speech as "one of the most consequential pronouncements in American History."2 Washington's message was printed in newspapers across the country; white politicians North and South embraced the speech and its author. So did most other black leaders - for a time. The 1895 Atlanta speech came at a time when black hopes for an equitable place in American society were being decimated by the white backlash against Reconstruction. Segregation laws multiplied across the South as lynchings and other racial violence increased. To many, Washington's message of modesty, rectitude, and service offered a soothing promise of social order and gradual change. Before long, though, other black leaders would assail Washington as an accommodationist and, ultimately, a traitor to the race. Eleven years after he made the Atlanta speech, Washington recorded portions of it in a Columbia Phonograph Company studio. The recording date is known - December 5, 1906 - but the location is not. It is also unclear why Washington recorded the speech. Tim Brooks, a historian of recorded sound, speculates the cylinder may have been made for fund-raising or simply as a family heirloom. It is the only known recording of Washington's voice.3 The recording is only three minutes and twenty-nine seconds long and captures roughly a third of the speech. The maximum length of a cylinder recording was about four minutes. Washington abridges his speech by dropping the fifth paragraph. The recording ends after the sixth paragraph. It is possible that Washington continued the address on additional cylinders that have not survived or been located. By the time he made the recording, Washington's Atlanta speech - and his enormous power as a black leader - had come under growing attack from other African Americans, most famously by W.E.B. Du Bois. He was criticized for accommodating white supremacy and using his authority as the de facto spokesman for black America to suppress his rivals. Still, Washington was an enormously influential figure in African American history and a powerful speaker at a time when black social activism was under fierce attack in the South.
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