Booker T. Washington: "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are"

Washington delivering the Atlanta Compromise Speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition before a mixed-race audience.

"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".

Washington, Booker T. “The Atlanta Compromise Speech”. Cotton States and International Exposition, September 18, 1895. History Matters. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/

One of the most notable and inarguably the most universally accepted method of resisting oppression at the time was elaborated upon by Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and one of the most dominant figures in civil rights. As opposed to Wells’ call for distancing the black community from white society, Washington wishes for a reconciliation between the two. During the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta Washington delivered what would be known as the Atlanta Compromise, which urged a less active and more bridge-building method of achieving acceptance. His major metaphor, “cast down your bucket where you are”, serves as a direct attack to the black men who looked to legislation following abolition, as he claims the best way to eliminate the destructive force of slavery was to ingratiate oneself with those around them of other races. Washington, not much unlike Wells, also seeks to dismantle the suppression of blackness through education, but instead of educating the world on the injustices faced, the black community educates the white community on who these people that are being lynched and beaten without consequence truly are.