The Atlanta Exposition Address

Habibat Oguntade
Ap English III
Period 2
1/12/10
The Atlanta Exposition Address
In this detailed autobiography, Booker T. Washington shares is experience with his audience, and gives them an understanding of certain things he believed in and why he made certain suggestions. He was invited to be a representative of the negro race at the Atlanta exposition. Booker T. Washington gave the address with great confidence and enthusiasm, with the hope of creating a new era of industrial progress. Washington believed that the north, south and negro race should amalgamate and work together, towards achieving progress.
Washington tried as much as possible in order to make the negro race reconcile with the south. “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.” Washington tried to create a bond between the negros and the southerners. He believed that this would enable them to offer assistance to each other, whenever their assistance is needed. This would help stimulate various things, even the economy.
Booker T. Washington didn’t believe African Americans should be striving for high political positions. Not that he didn’t want them to be educated, but he thought positions like that may require a lot more then what the African Americans know. He then advised them to go on with agriculture, hopefully, they will be able to attain some economic stability, thereby gaining the love of the southereners. Washington seemd like a honest, trustworthy and confident individual. He knew there would be no progress, as people still continue to be disloyal. “Dr. Lyman Abbott, then the pastor of Plymouth Church, and also editor of the Outlook (then the Christian Union), asked me to write a letter for his paper giving my opinion of the exact condition, mental and moral, of the colored ministers in the South, as based upon my observations. I wrote the letter, giving the exact facts as I conceived them to be. The picture painted was a rather black one—or, since I am black, shall I say “white”? It could not be otherwise with a race but a few years out of slavery, a race which had not had time or opportunity to produce a competent ministry What I said soon reached every Negro minister in the country, I think, and the letters of condemnation which I received from them were not few. I think that for a year after the publication of this article every association and every conference or religious body of any kind, of my race, that met, did not fail before adjourning to pass a resolution condemning me, or calling upon me to retract or modify what I had said. Many of these organizations went so far in their resolutions as to advise parents to cease sending their children to Tuskegee” Washington criticized those ministers with confidence, with the hope that it will straightened them out. Lots of them didn’t like that idea, but they couldn’t really do nothing, because his criticism was not false.