On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his famous address to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. Washington declared before this regional business gathering his acquiescence in the name of the black Southern population to the new regime of almost total black disfranchisement and the abrogation of civil rights within a social, political, and economic order based on explicit racial subordination. The speech offered the architects of the new segregationist order a beguiling metaphor to rationalize their efforts; the races would now work, Washington vowed, “separate as the fingers … one as the hand” in the restlessly improving spirit of free enterprise. He also exhorted black and white Southerners to “cast down your buckets where you are” in the region—an appeal that offered white employers tractable, low-wage black labor and consigned blacks to the most humble opportunities that racial subordination relegated to them.

Washington’s rise to singular prominence as a laissez-faire–minded collaborator with segregation is by now well documented. In debates with other black racial advocates of the time regarding ways forward—the importance of maintaining the franchise and civil rights, broad liberal education, etc.—Washington focused on the accumulation of property and wealth within the boundaries imposed by the regime of white supremacy.

It bears reminding, for example, that Washington and his best-known adversary on this latter question, W.E.B. Du Bois, were not antagonists at the time of the “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Their disagreement over racial strategy—whether to protest open racial subordination or accommodate and find ways to operate within it—had not yet taken shape in 1895, and wouldn’t become a public breach until several years later. Like many in their stratum of would-be race spokesmen and spokeswomen, in the 1890s both men accepted the premise that the black freedpeople were a “child race” in need of tutelage. Even Du Bois’s argument for the franchise in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 was premised on the belief that a chief effect of the vote would be to ratify racial leadership by “men of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by force of precept and example.”

Nor was Washington the first person in modern African American life to assume the role of Race Ventriloquist—a self-empowered advocate of strategic compromise seeking to sacrifice blacks’ citizenship rights in the name of one definition or another of “racial peace.” Five years before Washington’s Atlanta speech, Isaiah T. Montgomery, founder of the all-black town, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was the only black delegate to the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention. That infamous body disfranchised the state’s black population and installed white supremacy as the foundation of Mississippi’s legal structure. Montgomery, like Washington, disparaged political activism for blacks other than himself. In 1890, he not only was a convention delegate; he also served on the committee that disfranchised black voters, and he voted for and endorsed disfranchisement from the convention floor. In that address, he purported to lay “the suffrage of 123,000 of my fellow-men at the feet of this Convention” as an “olive branch of peace.”

Articulate black Mississippians were outraged at Montgomery’s hubris in speaking for the state’s black population without a single proxy—much as the black Atlantans who boycotted the segregated Cotton States Exposition were appalled to learn afterward that Washington had been similarly presumptuous in professing to barter away their rights.