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At the Atlanta Exposition

Booker T. Washington · the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta · September 18, 1895
text: Wikisource · published before 1931, in the public domain
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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 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. 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 labor, 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 labor 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 percent 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 exercise 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 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, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.

The divergences

"Cast down your bucket where you are" — the same six words are delivered twice, to two addressees, and file differently each time. To "those of my race" they are an Order: stay in the South, drop the foreign land, take the work at hand. To "those of the white race" they arrive inside "were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race," which the room can file as a Report of counsel given elsewhere, binding nobody present. They part on function, and the costs part with them: the first addressee is told to give up a destination, the second to hire the labour already on the place.

"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." — the audience files a settlement in which it draws the boundary; a hearer who looks for the boundary finds that the speech supplies no test. Read narrow, "purely social" is the parlour, and school, wage, jury, and ballot fall under mutual progress. Read wide, it takes in the schoolhouse and the streetcar. They part on scope. Eight months later the Supreme Court sorted a railway car onto the social side of a line drawn in the same terms, and the sorting was not done in this hall.

"You will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories" — the Exposition's directors file a Promise and take the applause as acceptance; the eight millions whose conduct is pledged were not in the room and file, at most, an Assertion about what follows if the help comes. They part on function: a binding, or a forecast. A promise made on another's behalf can be defaulted on by people who never made it, and the default is charged to them.

"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." — the speaker files an Assertion about the order of business, with the claim of right granted in the first clause and merely ranked in the second. Du Bois filed the second clause as a Retraction, the claim withdrawn in the act of being made, and gave the address the name it carries: the Atlanta Compromise. They part on target — whether the sentence acts on the world, ranking two goods, or acts on the claim standing in front of it.

"Both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago" — the hall files an Assertion about a common starting line, which is what makes the one-sided pledge around it look like an exchange. A reader holding the 1865 ledger files a Palter: both hands were empty, and one party had been an entry in the other's inventory. They part on motive, over whether the omission is the tact the occasion required or the work the clause was built to do. Slavery is named once in the address, as the near end of a leap.

"The laws of changeless justice bind / Oppressor with oppressed" — the hall files a Report, four lines of verse rounding off a paragraph about return on investment; a hearer attending to the words files a Threat keyed to standing, since the lines say the two races go down together and name one of them the oppressor. They part on function. The attribution is withheld, which lets the warning be received as literature by anyone who prefers to receive it that way.

"In a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law" — the directors file a hope for the future, offered as prayer and costing nothing to hear. A Black listener in Georgia in 1895 files an Order with one object, since "all classes" and "the mandates of law" name the men who took prisoners out of jails. They part on scope: a general aspiration, or the single practice the sentence declines to say. Together with the blotting out of animosities, this is everything the address asks of the party it is addressing, and it is asked of God.