Black hands push back: Reconsidering the rhetoric of Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington has long been considered a great compromiser—but not in a way that reflects positively on him. In his infamous Atlanta Exposition Address, he supposedly compromised with the segregationist South in a push for mere economic opportunity for African Americans. This essay, however, reconsiders Washington’s rhetoric, including his speech in Atlanta, by exploring the ways he spoke about human hands, deploying a language that positioned his listeners as agents of resistance capable of pushing back against systems of oppression. Beyond offering a reinterpretation, however, I argue that Washington adeptly navigated the tensions of race, geography, and body of his era and thereby expanded the constituency of civil-rights participants beyond those clustered in Northern urban communities. Ultimately, Washington’s rhetoric of hands prompts us to reconsider his place in the American and African American rhetorical traditions, and it demonstrates the importance of geography in rhetorical criticism.