Lesson 66: Washington, Part 16
Reading assignment: Chapter 14
This lecture is longer than most. This is a very important document. It analyzes one of the most important speeches in American history: Washington’s 1895 speech at the Atlanta exposition. It is a rhetorical masterpiece. I discuss the rhetoric in my lecture.
This document is worth the time I devote to it. Don’t short-change yourself. You need to be familiar with it.
In this speech, Washington used the image of a hand: the fingers are separate, but it is one hand. He used this to declare his acceptance of the principle of separate but equal. He regarded this as a temporary situation, as his speech indicates.
As background, the states of the South were passing laws separating the races. One manifestation of this was state laws separating the races on public transportation: trollies. The privately owned trolley companies resisted this. It was costing them extra money to add more cars.
In Louisiana, the state government passed such a law in 1890. In 1892, the New Orleans trolley company and a group of white, mixed-race, and black citizens organized a test case for the courts. They persuaded a man who was seven-eighths white to get on board a trolley. State law had re-dedined him and his peers as black. They warned the trolley company in advance. He was arrested and fined $25, which was a lot of money in 1892. The court decided against the man, Homer Plessy. So did the state appeals court. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May, 1896, the Court handed down Plessy v. Ferguson. (Ferguson was the judge who presided over the case in New Orleans.) By a 7 to 1 decision, the Court upheld the Louisiana law. It declared that the principle of separate but equal was constitutional. That legal principle stood until 1954, when Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas reversed it. The story of the Plessy case is here.
Washington understood that blacks would not be granted social equality for many years. He predicted that this would take 50 years. Legally, it took 60 years. In the meantime, he called on whites in the audience to accept the decision of the free market regarding the value of every person’s contribution.