ABSTRACT
Blacks were never reconciled to their inferior status and kept search-ing for the best approach that offered a way out. As stepchildren inAmerican society, blacks alternately pursued assimilation with whites and independence from them. One school of thought was that blacks should accommodate themselves to overwhelming white power. Booker T. Washington, a former Virginia slave and the nation’s most powerful black man, declared that agitating for equality was ‘the extremist folly’ and proposed that blacks accept temporarily their second-class citizenship. As the founder of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute for industrial training, he delivered a controversial speech before the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1895, in which he appealed to whites to accept blacks as partners in reviving the South’s lagging economy. He thought that once blacks had proven their worth in the marketplace political equality and social integration would follow. With little fanfare, he pressed the black cause through northern philanthropy, patronage appointments, and lawsuits.
