Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Address to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition is one of the most famous speeches in American history. The goal of the Atlanta Exposition was to showcase the economic progress of the South since the Civil War, to encourage international trade, and to attract investors to the region. Anxious to show there had been progress in race relations as well, the promoters invited Washington, who had a reputation as a conservative black leader, to speak at the opening ceremonies. Washington gave his address on September 18, 1895, before a predominantly white audience.
On the surface, Washington did not disappoint the Exposition’s white promoters. Stressing the importance of hard work and gradual progress for blacks, he argued that they should “cast down their buckets” where they were in agriculture rather than try to go into politics, and to make friends with whites who could help them. Indeed some blacks later dubbed the speech “The Atlanta Compromise” believing that Washington had compromised their civil rights unnecessarily. But to Washington, this was a compromise that cut both ways. He asked whites to also “cast down their buckets” and hire black workers, rather than immigrants. He argued that by helping blacks, whites were helping themselves, as African Americans made up one third of the South’s population and could do much to help with its economic growth. Conversely, if blacks failed, they would be a significant detriment to Southern progress. Thus when Washington said in the full speech “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,” he really saw himself as striking a bargain with whites to get their economic support in exchange for not challenging segregation. Moreover he firmly believed that blacks would eventually gain political and social equality based on their economic achievements.
The response to the speech in 1895 was overwhelmingly positive, among both blacks and whites. Recent Harvard Ph.D. recipient W.E.B. Du Bois, then teaching at Wilberforce University, congratulated Washington in a telegram, calling his speech “a word fitly spoken.” Washington was soon in high demand as a speaker and became one of the best known black men in America. He parlayed this success into fundraising efforts, raising millions of dollars for black education in the South and his industrial training school, Tuskegee Institute. White politicians began consulting Washington on “safe” appointees for traditionally black positions in the government, as a recommendation from the “Wizard of Tuskegee” was a guarantee to whites that the candidate would have similar conservative views. Washington’s influence was such that in 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dine at the White House, and he became a key advisor to Roosevelt on racial matters.
But despite these improvements, most whites never followed through on their half of the compromise. Black economic development at the turn of the twentieth century was mainly a result of self-help efforts in the black community rather than white investment. Moreover, Washington’s assertion that socially they could remain as “separate as the fingers” came on the eve of the Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court ruling that segregation was not unconstitutional. Following the “separate but equal” doctrine that Plessy laid out, the southern states passed a series of laws completing a system of total segregation of blacks and whites.
By the time Washington recorded this speech in 1908, his positions had not gone unchallenged within the black community. Du Bois, for example, began to argue that economic equality would not be possible without political rights and saw segregation as robbing blacks of any dignity Washington hoped them to gain through economic achievement. Even Washington began secretly funding lawsuits to challenge segregation and loss of voting rights. Nonetheless, he continued publicly to espouse the ideals of the Atlanta address, and it was not until after his death in 1915 that Du Bois’s ideas became those of the majority.
Washington made this recording at a Columbia Phonograph studio on December 5, 1908 during a trip to New York City. It was a small pressing, intended for his private use to give as gifts, listed in the Columbia Acoustic Matrix Series as catalog number 14605. The recording was a single-sided disc, which could only hold about one-third (around 3:20) of the whole speech. What he chose to include was his introductory paragraph and the “cast down your bucket” metaphor, with an abbreviated version of its lesson to both blacks and whites. Ironically for such an important speech, Washington does not sound to the modern ear to be a particularly engaging speaker. He uses a somewhat monotonous pattern of rising and falling intonation and speaks in a highly enunciated fashion. This latter aspect may reflect the standard practice at the time, given the poor quality of recording technology, or it may be that he was at pains to prove how wellspoken African Americans could be to whites who assumed blacks to have inferior intellects.
This is the only known recording of Washington’s voice, and has been misdated in many sources. The explanation for this misdating is that the copy in the National Archives is not an original disc, but a reel-to-reel recording of a later radio broadcast of the speech, and either the radio announcer or the donor mistakenly noted the date of the first recording as 1906. However, the “Columbia Master Book Discography” (eds. Tim Brooks and Brian Rust) clearly identifies it as being from 1908, a date further supported by the fact that Washington was in Tuskegee in December 1906, but was in New York in early December 1908, where he had access to a Columbia studio. In 1920, Columbia reissued a limited number of records under its personal label by request of the Washington family and sold the remainders to Broome Special Phonograph Records, the first blackowned record label in the United States, which pasted its company label over the Columbia label and offered it to the public. The record in its original form is extremely rare.
Source: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/BookerT.pdf
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. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.
Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.
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 neighbour, 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. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. 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, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. 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 the 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 defence 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 those 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 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. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug-stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life, not only from the Southern states, but especially from Northern philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. 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.
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind, that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of the field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, this, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
