On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington delivered a speech before a predominantly white audience in Atlanta. Georgia. The speech, later called the “Atlanta Compromise,” offered a de facto deal: Black Americans would cease demanding the vote and social integration; Southern whites would permit educational charity for Black people and establish some schools. Even the most prominent critic of the idea, W. E. B. Du Bois, initially said the proposal “might be the basis for a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South.”

Washington himself did not see any such “compromise” as permanent. A year later, in The Atlantic, he argued that education, vocational skills, and Black self-reliance—the hallmarks of his Tuskegee Institute—would transform the circumstances of Black people and, ultimately, those of the nation itself. “Nothing else so soon brings about right relations between the two races in the South as the industrial progress of the negro,” he wrote. “It is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights. Whether he will or not, a white man respects a negro who owns a two-story brick house.”

Washington was mistaken. Many white Americans did not object to equality with Black Americans solely in the political and social spheres; they objected to equality of any kind. And if progress—whether industrial, educational, or otherwise—was going to lead to equality, then it was not something that Jim Crow would abide.