The Atlanta Cotton States Exposition Speech ('The Atlanta Compromise')
Delivered on September 18, 1895, in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington advocated vocational education, industrial skill, and economic self-reliance for African Americans during the Jim Crow era.
Full Transcript
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and Citizens: One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands.
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.
Defining Key Excerpts
"Cast down your bucket where you are—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded."
"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."
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