who is washington addressing in the atlanta exposition
a predominantly white audience
title: Atlanta Exposition Speech text: recognized as one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. The speech was preceded by the reading of a dedicatory ode written by Frank Lebby Stanton. Washington began with a call to the blacks, who composed one third of the Southern population, to join the world of work. He declared that the South was where blacks were given their chance, as opposed to the North, especially in the worlds of commerce and industry. He told the white audience that rather than relying on the immigrant population arriving at the rate of a million people a year, they title: Atlanta Exposition Speech text: Atlanta Exposition Speech The Cotton States and International Exposition Speech was an address on the topic of race relations given by Booker T. Washington on September 18, 1895. The speech laid the foundation for the Atlanta compromise, an agreement between African-American leaders and Southern white leaders in which Southern blacks would work meekly and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic education and due process of law. The speech, presented before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition (the site of today's Piedmont Park) in Atlanta, Georgia, has been title: Piedmont Park text: the city incurred to hold the fair. Booker T. Washington delivered his famous Atlanta Exposition Speech at the Expo, which is "widely regarded as one of the most significant speeches in American history." In his speech, Washington pushed for progress but not integration, a point that angered many other black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Attractions included Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the Liberty Bell, and the first public demonstration of C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat's motion picture projection device which they called the Phantoscope. John Philip Sousa's "King Cotton" march was created for the expo title: Atlanta Exposition Speech text: 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. This phrase appeared at the end of the speech's fifth paragraph. It is commonly referred to as the "Hand simile." Certain historians, like Louis Harlan, saw this simile as Washington's personal embrace of racial segregation. The entire simile reads as follows: Ultimately, many Southern whites (Porter King, William Yates Atkinson, etc.) praised Washington for title: Atlanta Exposition Speech text: should hire some of the nation's eight million blacks. He praised blacks' loyalty, fidelity and love in service to the white population, but warned that they could be a great burden on society if oppression continued, stating that the progress of the South was inherently tied to the treatment of blacks and protection of their liberties. He addressed the inequality between commercial legality and social acceptance, proclaiming that "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house." Washington also suggested toleration of segregation