The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement | Blacks Should Not Agitate for Civil Rights

Born a slave on a Virginia plantation, Booker T. Washington rose to become one of the most influential black leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early in his career, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school that promoted industrial education and self-improvement as a means of uplifting blacks. Yet it was Washington’s 1895 address before the Atlanta Exposition that catapulted the renowned educator into the national spotlight. His speech, reprinted here, became one of the most influential—and controversial—addresses in American history....

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