White elites and even Du Bois initially celebrated the Atlanta Compromise

Evidence

Amid the excited applause from thousands, the waving handkerchiefs, the flowers pulled from White women’s bosoms that showered Washington when he finished, New South editor Clark Howell of the Atlanta Constitution sprinted up to the speakers’ platform. He shouted, “That man’s speech is the beginning of a moral revolution in America!” Washington’s words were telegraphed to every major newspaper in the nation. Editors published raving reviews. Democratic president Grover Cleveland arrived in Atlanta and called Washington the “new hope” for Black people. “Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta,” W. E. B. Du Bois glowed in a telegram on September 24, 1895. “It was a word fitly spoken.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 733

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The mechanics of elite approval (handkerchiefs, flowers, newspapers, presidential endorsement) echo how class/identity signaling works as described in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — powerful audiences rewarding the speaker who performs acceptable deference.
• QUESTION: Du Bois’s enthusiastic initial endorsement of Washington is striking given his later anti-Washington stance — worth tracing when the rupture happens.
• XREF: connects to: Atlanta’s image of racial moderation was elite economic calculation, not conviction — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 101