What is the significance of the atlanta compromise speech

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 , and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an interracial organization established in 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 , 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.

Atlanta Compromise Speech. In New Georgia Encyclopedia. Washington delivered his "Atlanta Compromise" speech on September The speech detailed Washington's accommodationist strategy of achieving racial equality, primarily through vocational training for African Americans. Courtesy of Georgia Archives , Vanishing Georgia, ful View on partner site. The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print.

Requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource should be submitted to the Georgia Archives. African American educator and leader Booker T. Washington delivered what is widely regarded as one of the most significant speeches in American history, the "Atlanta Compromise" speech, in View on source site.

All requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource must be submitted to the rights holder. Booker T. Washington is depicted at a White House dinner with U. Requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource should be submitted to the Hargrett Manuscript and Rare Book Library at the University of Georgia.

Author Derrick P. Alridge , University of Georgia. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories.

While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.

As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, 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, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.

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. There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all.

If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen.

Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed—blessing him that gives and him that takes. There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable: The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed; And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward.

We 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. Gentlemen of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch.