Cast Down Your Bucket - American History, 1493-1945

Notes from the Atlanta Compromise

ca. 1895

View the notes for a speech in the resource

By the mid-1890s, race relations in post-Reconstruction America were growing increasingly strained, particularly in the former slave States of the South. The White ruling elite imagined a nation in which the Black population would remain “separate but equal”. With the advent of the Jim Crow laws, segregation had overrun much of the South and racially motivated violence had grown common.

Written in 1895, these rough notes served as the basis for Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Though never written down, or signed by those in attendance, the so-called compromise was an agreement between African American community leaders and White politicians; Black workers would submit to White political rule and agree not to agitate for the right to vote, while White elites promised to ensure educational rights, uphold due process and donate funds to African American charities.

Alongside a number of financial figures, the words ‘cast down bucket where you are’ have been scrawled hurriedly across the page, alluding to an allegory that Washington would employ when he spoke before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. The final speech typified his views on racial cooperation; he believed powerful Whites should be accommodated, rather than resisted, and argued that African Americans who wished to improve their social circumstances should reach out to White neighbors for friendship and help.

“To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of preserving 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, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded.”

Born enslaved, Booker T. Washington was, in the wake of Emancipation, able to work his way through agricultural school, becoming a teacher and helping to found the Tuskegee Institute, a college for Black teachers. His address in Atlanta is now considered one of the most influential speeches in American history and helped to establish Washington as one of the leading spokesmen of the African American community. His long term goal was to end disenfranchisement and empower the Black population through education, thus raising wealth that would trickle down, eventually, into political power.

However, his belief in racial cooperation clashed with the mission of fledgling civil rights group, the NAACP, and leaders including W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. These activists felt that the political elite had not held up their end of the bargain, particularly regarding legal rights, and feared that Washington’s vision of “accommodationism” would never lead to equality. They intended to attack White supremacy, which Washington had believed impossible, and fight for their civil rights. After his death in 1915, many of Washington’s supporters turned away. A younger generation of African Americans were prepared to fight for their civil rights and ultimately, equality, in a struggle that would come to dominate the next 50 years of American history.

"Cast Down Your Bucket"