The Atlanta Compromise and the Du Bois Rebuttal

In September of eighteen ninety-five, Booker T. Washington stood at the podium of the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition and delivered the speech that would define his public life. Before an audience that was predominantly white, he told Black Americans to cast down their buckets where they are, to accept the economic opportunities available to them and to let political equality wait. "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers," Washington said, "yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." He held up his hand with the fingers spread, then closed them into a fist.

It was a formulation that the white political establishment found deeply reassuring. It was also a formulation that Washington understood would be received that way. He was trying to purchase space for Black economic development in the South by trading away the demand for political rights, at least explicitly and in public.

W. E. B. Du Bois was then a professor at Atlanta University, a few miles west of the Exposition grounds. He initially praised Washington's speech. By nineteen oh three, he had changed his assessment and published The Souls of Black Folk, written during his years in Atlanta, which named the Atlanta Compromise by that name and argued that accommodation was not a strategy but a surrender. "The way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away," Du Bois wrote.

The debate Washington and Du Bois conducted, largely from Atlanta, set the terms of every strategic argument inside the civil rights movement that followed. Integration versus separatism, political agitation versus economic self-sufficiency, nonviolent witness versus self-defense, the movement spent sixty years working through the same questions the two men posed from the same city before the movement had a name.