Atlanta Exposition Speech

Content Warning: The source material references racial prejudice.

Washington argues that the answer to the problem of racial inequality lies in a joint effort between Black and white people to integrate Black people into the Southern economy. To convince his mainly white audience that it is in their interests to cooperate in promoting Black economic independence, he employs Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle: logos (appealing to the listener’s reason), pathos (appealing to the listener’s emotion), and ethos (demonstrating the speaker’s integrity). He also emphasizes the timeliness (kairos) of his message. The first line of his speech sets a premise and a problem: “One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race” and the South cannot reach its “highest success” unless that population reaches theirs (Paragraph 1). He emphasizes that the problem exists right now and failure to resolve it will have dire consequences.

Washington establishes himself as a man of character and objectivity by showing good will towards his white audience. Expressing optimism regarding “friendship” between the two races, he flatters the organizers of the event: “in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than [in] this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress” (Paragraph 1). In addition, the exposition represents a “new era of industrial progress,” which will provide opportunities for Black people as well as white. He wants success for the whole South.

Washington establishes a motif in which Southern Black people are likened to a ship lost at sea. Spotting another ship, its passengers cry out for water, but voices from the “friendly vessel” call back, “Cast down your bucket where you are” (Paragraph 3). The captain lowers his bucket and to his surprise pulls up fresh water rather than salt. The answer to his problem lay where he was. Washington says the same of Black people in the post-Reconstruction South. Rather than moving to another country or waiting for white people to save them, Southern Black people can better their condition with resources they already have.

Washington suggests that Black men should befriend their white neighbors “in every manly way” (Paragraph 3). Black Masculine Identity is an important theme in the speech. His plan for racial progress rests in part on the economic labor of Black men. Washington already applauded the organizers of the exposition for recognizing the “value and manhood of the American Negro” (Paragraph 1), but now he assures Black men that by casting down their buckets where they are they will gain not only economic independence but their dignity as men. He gestures towards a view of Reconstruction that compares formerly enslaved people to children: because they were “ignorant and inexperienced,” they “began at the top instead of at the bottom” (Paragraph 2). He believes it was a mistake for Black Americans after the Civil War to seek political office and leisure before seeking education and economic prosperity. Emphasizing The Dignity of Work, Washington ties masculinity to labor and frugality in an effort to shape a new conception of success based on economic independence rather than “the ornamental gewgaws of life” (Paragraph 4).

Washington’s speech recognizes that even the most industrious and hard-working Black people cannot become prosperous on their own. White people control the economic system, so Black workers rely on white people for job opportunities, raw materials, capital, and other economic necessities. Much of the speech focuses on convincing the white audience that Black people will make good economic partners. This goal requires him to address the Fear of Racial Violence. In casting their buckets among their Black neighbors, he argues, white Southerners will find themselves (as in the past) “surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen” (Paragraph 5). He notes that Black people have always been central to Southern society: “We have proved our loyalty […] in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves” (Paragraph 5). By sentimentalizing the past (pathos), Washington seeks to neutralize his white audience’s fears about Black people. He assures them that, as in the past, Southern Black people “will stand by you […] ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours” (Paragraph 5).

Washington turns from pathos to logos, using a simile likening the South to a hand to assure his white audience that, while economic integration is essential to progress, “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers” (Paragraph 6). He advocates not a color-blind society but one in which all members realize that their economic and cultural destinies will rise or fall together. Buttressing his argument with (unattributed) lines from John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “At Port Royal” (1862), he writes, “The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed;/And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast" (Paragraph 6). These lines remind Washington’s audience of the legacy of slavery and transform his call for cooperation from a practical to a moral imperative. The intensity of white America's violence and oppression has, ironically, tied the destiny of the two races together. Washington sets out alternative scenarios from which he invites his audience to choose:

We [Black Americans] shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third [of] its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic (Paragraph 7).

As he brings his speech to a close, he obliquely assures Black Americans that economic progress will lead to the higher goal of social and political equality. This passage develops the theme of The Inevitability of Progress and the Invisible Hand. He argues that “no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized” (Paragraph 9). Radical activism is thus unnecessary and even counterproductive because it will increase resentment among white people whose economic cooperation is needed. Labeling activism such as mandatory desegregation in the social sphere as “artificial forcing,” he returns to the practicality and pragmatism that infuse his speech and indeed his life’s work: “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house” (Paragraph 9).

In setting out his vision of Black progress, Washington exhorts his white audience to fulfill their moral duty while also appealing to their self-interest. Black laborers are no threat, he assures them, unless their economic opportunities are curtailed. Economic development is the solution to the “great and intricate problem” of race and race relations in the South. Black economic independence followed by social and political justice will, he promises, turn “our beloved South” into a “new heaven and a new earth” (Paragraph 10).