Atlanta Exposition Speech

The Atlanta Exposition Speech was an address on the topic of race relations given by African-American scholar Booker T. Washington on September 18, 1895.

[3] Washington began with a call to the African-American population, who composed one third of the Southern United States, to join the world of work.

[5] The phrase was originally a call for a doomed ship to "cast down your bucket" to the ocean, upon which the sailors discovered fresh water to drink from the nearby Amazon River mouth.

and Washington sought to capitalize on these issues by offering Southern black labor as an alternative, especially since his Tuskegee Institute was in the business of training such workers.

For blacks, however, the "bucket motif" represented a call to personal uplift and diligence, as the South needed them to rebuild following the Civil War.