Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech pleased southern white landowners

Evidence

At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the “Atlanta Compromise.” He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers “to dignify and glorify common labour.” So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 732

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘rise from the bottom, not the top’ and anti-egalitarian rhetoric is a textbook assimilationist stance by Kendi’s later scheme — placing this passage in the three-way taxonomy will be useful.