Booker T. Washington and Jim Crow

Using the Power of Self-Help in the Fight Against Racism

Jan 20, 2009 Ron Goodwin

Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech ignited the racial debate over whether integration or segregation was the best path for economic equality.

A short 30 years after the supposed cessation of hostilities ended the American Civil War, Booker T. Washington accepted the invitation to address a predominately white audience at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition on September 18, 1895. In the speech that would later become known as the Atlanta Compromise, Washington outlined his plan for what he believed would be the beginning of a new black community and ultimately the end of Jim Crow: the program of self-help.

Even though Washington was born into slavery, he eventually rose to prominence as the head of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. By the time of his death in 1915, he was the unequivocal spokesman for the black race. However, it was this speech in 1895 that cemented his role as the black leader of his day.

While many of Washington’s contemporaries saw this speech as acquiescence to Jim Crow racism, they failed to recognize the long-term impacts of the futile attempts to integrate a society that did not wish to be integrated. These impacts manifested themselves in the numerous urban riots that occurred throughout the country. From the Springfield Riots in 1908 to Los Angeles’s Rodney King Riots in 1992, blacks continually fought for equality and acceptance from a society that appeared more than comfortable keeping them in a subordinate economic a social role.

Nonetheless, Washington’s version of self-help acknowledged 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,” and that struggle must focus on economic development. Washington believed the economic development of the black community was a prerequisite to social recognition and the end of Jim Crow. He further said, “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 exercise of these privileges.”

Washington was well aware that in 1895 too many white Americans were simply not ready to accept blacks as social and political equals. He nonetheless warned his audience that they were also responsible for the economic development of the black community, since the economic fate of the South was tied to the relationship between white leadership and black labor. He further admonished his audience when he said,

“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.”

Booker T. Washington did accept segregation in 1895 when he also said, “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.” However, this was not as a sign of weakness or cowardice. Instead, it was an acknowledgement that the only way to end Jim Crow segregation was through the constant struggle of economic development which must first be accomplished within a segregated black community.

Reference

Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 3, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 583–587.

The copyright of the article Booker T. Washington and Jim Crow in American History is owned by Ron Goodwin. Permission to republish Booker T. Washington and Jim Crow in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.