The Atlanta Compromises

On September 18, 1895 Booker T. Washington was invited to deliver a speech for the Cotton States  and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia before a mixed audience, a historic first for a Black leader south of the Mason Dixon line. In his speech – a masterpiece of balance and rhetoric – Washington famously declared, "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Washington accepted for his people segregation and political disenfranchisement in return for an implied guarantee from Southern whites of an industrial education that allowed for economic progress and a minimal degree of safety and security if African Americans remained docile. This came to be known as “the Atlanta Compromise.”

Whites in both the North and South loved the speech and lionized the speaker. Here at last was a judicious and pragmatic approach to the perennial problem of race relations in the South. (90% of the African American population lived in the South, and the North didn’t recognize that it had a problem – yet.) Frederick Douglass, always loud and cantankerous, had died in Washington, DC just six months before, and after the speech, Washington was appointed HNIC, a position he held until his death in 1915.

Not everybody was pleased with the policies of The Tuskegee Machine, most famously W.E.B. Du Bois who rejected the accommodationist principles of the Compromise and advocated for higher education, full civil rights, and an immediate end to segregation. And here I quote an excerpt from Dudley Randall’s poem, “Booker T. and W.E.B.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,

“That all you folks have missed the boat

Who shout about the right to vote,

And spend vain days and sleepless nights

In uproar over civil rights.

Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,

But work, and save, and buy a house.”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,

“For what can property avail

If dignity and justice fail.

Unless you help to make the laws,

They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.

A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,

No matter how much cash you’ve got.

Speak soft, and try your little plan,

But as for me, I’ll be a man.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—

“I don’t agree,”

Said W.E.B.

“But the title of your blog is plural!” I hear you cry. “To what other Compromise do you refer?”

Astutely noted. There was another Compromise, enjoined upon another minority community - Southern Jews. They too took a largely accommodationist stance, if they weren’t enthusiastic sons of the South to begin with. The names of two Jews associated with the South have come down to us through history – to those of us who know any history – Judah P. Benjamin (1811 - 1884) and Leo Frank (1884 - 1915). They represent different modalities of unacceptability. 

Benjamin was a traitor to the Union. While serving in the U.S. Congress as a Senator from Louisiana, he resigned in 1861 to serve in the Confederacy. Acting as President Jefferson Davis’ right-hand man throughout the Civil War, Benjamin was dubbed “the brains of the South” by many but also “the fat Jew sitting at his desk” by disgruntled others.

Leo Frank has gone down in history as the Victim, the only Jew in the American chronicle to be lynched. Frank moved to Atlanta from New York City to work as a supervisor for the National Pencil Company which used white girls as employees. One of these, Mary Phagan, was found raped and dead in the factory basement, and suspicion eventually centered on Frank, already resented as a “Yankee Jew.” A kangaroo court convicted him and sentenced him to death, but the obvious miscarriage of justice forced a reluctant governor of Georgia to commute his sentence to life in prison. This inflamed “the Knights of Mary Phagen” (later to morph into a renewed Ku Klux Klan) who extracted Frank from prison and lynched him with an evident pride that shows in the postcards that were made of the event.

Under the circumstances, Southern Jews were not inclined to make ethnic claims nor even to complain too loudly when members of their community were attacked. Their best hope, they thought, was to present themselves as Southerners, just like their neighbors, with the only difference being one of faith. Whatever their feelings were in the face of the evident and daily oppression of African Americans they either witnessed or participated in, they weren’t going to rock the boat. 

Even the obscenity of the Leo Frank case brought no squeak of protest. Established Southern Jews distanced themselves or stayed silent, fearing that vocal defense would endanger the broader community — a direct parallel to the logic of Washington's compromise of trading short-term solidarity for a hoped-for (but ultimately illusory) long-term communal security. 

What do you do when surrounded by a majority with a seemingly unbreakable grip on the levers of power, one that threatens to annihilate you at the first sign of protest or move towards liberation? Perhaps the Compromise was the best you could make of a bad hand. You accept a permanent subordinate position, but you may make it through the night. The prime directive was clear: shut the fuck up!

There could be no Jewish equivalent to Washington’s Atlanta speech. Washington spoke for a community under severe legal and violent oppression. He had to negotiate survival against a hostile white power. Jews were way more integrated into civic and social life, but their “acceptance” was always conditional and could be withdrawn at any time. They couldn’t even mention the Compromise. Naming it would have undermined the illusion of natural belonging it was meant to project.

The Southern Jewish community was – and is – steeped in accommodationism. “Be model citizens,” they were told by their rabbis and leaders. “Avoid controversy. Do not draw attention to distinctively Jewish concerns–particularly anything touching on race or labor relations. Show yourselves to be civic-minded, patriotic, deferential to local custom.” It was accommodation by ethos rather than by formal declaration.

Shut the fuck up!

— Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in The Texas Branch.

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