REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES ★^673Symbolizing the change was
the juxtaposition, in 1895, of the
death of Frederick Douglass with
Booker T. Washington’s widely praised
speech, titled the “Atlanta Compro-
mise,” at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition
that urged blacks to adjust to segrega-
tion and abandon agitation for civil and
political rights. Born a slave in 1856,
Washington had studied as a young
man at Hampton Institute, Virginia.
He adopted the outlook of Hampton’s
founder, General Samuel Armstrong,
who emphasized that obtaining farms
or skilled jobs was far more important
to African- Americans emerging from
slavery than the rights of citizenship.
Washington put this view into prac-
tice when he became head of Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama, a center for voca-
tional education (education focused on training for a job rather than broad
learning).
In his Atlanta speech, Washington repudiated the abolitionist tradition
that stressed ceaseless agitation for full equality. He urged blacks not to try to
combat segregation: “In all the things that are purely social we can be as sep-
arate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual prog-
ress.” Washington advised his people to seek the assistance of white employers
who, in a land racked by labor turmoil, would prefer a docile, dependable black
labor force to unionized whites. Washington’s ascendancy rested in large part
on his success in channeling aid from wealthy northern whites to Tuskegee
and to black politicians and newspapers who backed his program. But his sup-
port in the black community also arose from a widespread sense that in the
world of the late nineteenth century, frontal assaults on white power were
impossible and that blacks should concentrate on building up their segregated
communities.
The Rise of the AFL
Within the labor movement, the demise of the Knights of Labor and the ascen-
dancy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) during the 1890s reflected
a similar shift away from a broadly reformist past to more limited goals. As
Booker T. Washington, advocate of industrial
education and economic self- help.In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period?