Booker T. Washington came first prominently into view by the speech from which the above extract was taken, delivered by him at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia, September 18, 1895. What D. H. Hill had urged for the Southern whites in 1866, Washington now urged for the Negroes. The Northern people were growing somewhat weary of the Negroes’ continual appeals for political recognition and this speech, avoiding such and couched in the most conciliatory phrases concerning the Southern whites, was a surprising departure. It struck a popular chord. It was written up in the very best vein by the most celebrated journalistic correspondent of that period, James Creelman, then in the zenith of his career of feature writing, as an “epoch making oration.” This writer, commanding the pages of the most widely read New York paper of that day, ranked—
“Professor Booker T. Washington, President of the Tuskegee (Alabama) Normal and Industrial Institute, as the foremost man of his race in America.”[248]
But Creelman did not stand alone. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution telegraphed to the North that “the address was a revelation.”
The Boston Transcript declared: “It dwarfed all the other proceedings and the exposition itself.”[249]
President Cleveland was even quoted as affirming that “the exposition would be fully justified if it did not do more than furnish the opportunity for its delivery.”[250]
The key-note of the speech has been before noted. In addition it contained two specific declarations, which constituted “the revelation”:
“1. 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.[251]
2. The wisest of my race understand, that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest 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.”[252]
When to these expressions was added the further declaration:—
“that we shall prosper as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor.”[253]—