Up From Slavery Rhetorical Analysis

Booker T. Washington went down in history as one of the most influential African Americans of the nineteenth century. He was born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Franklin County, VA. At the time of his birth, slavery ceased to exist in the most Northern States, abolitionists began to demonstrate and influence state governments pushing toward the emancipation and sometimes the relocation of former slaves and descendants (National Park Service, 2016). In his autobiography Up From Slavery, he describes in great detail his experience growing up on the plantation up until the day of his emancipation. He goes through the trying times of the civil war, and the impact it had on his master’s family. Throughout the biography you are able

to grasp just how important education was to him. Unfortunately, as a slave he was not able to partake in such learning, but after his emancipation he was able to achieve that dream. He studied at Hampton Institute, where he later was offered a teaching position.
Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in1881 on the Hampton model, located in Alabama (Harlan, 2016).
According to Harlan, it is here where “he convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that would keep blacks "down on the farm" and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and particularly the new self- made millionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie he promised the inculcation of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living within the limited horizons of the post- Reconstruction South, Washington held out industrial education as the means of escape from the web of sharecropping and debt and the achievement of attainable, petit-bourgeois goals of self-employment, landownership, and small business.” (Harlan, 2016)
Washington gained his popularity in 1895, after he delivered his famous speech The Atlanta Exposition Address at a major southern trade fair in Georgia.
In his speech, he spoke to encourage African Americans to work from the bottom and not the top, i.e., “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top” (Baym & Levine, 2013, p. 450). Washington believed in a separate and unequal approach to segregation. He wanted the blacks to take it upon themselves to become educated and work their way up through hard work. He believed that this was the best way to win the acceptance of the white American society. In other words, they needed to show their worth in order to receive respect. This seemed to be a common theme to his work. At first his received great support from other influential leaders of the era such as, W.E.B. Du Bois, but as the years passed the disenfranchisement he so fondly spoke about was not progressing the lives of any African Americans.
In the beginning of his speech he uses periodic sentence and parallelism to convey the African Americans hopes and dreams after their emancipation, i.e., “that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill” (449-450).

Washington uses allegory when speaking of the ship lost at sea as the story relates to his wanting the people of his race to be friendly with the white Americans, i.e., “A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel” (450). This is also used as an extended metaphor throughout the piece, as he compares the bucket, “cast down your bucket”, to the burdens his people are facing, i.e., “I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’” (450). The phrase is repeated throughout the entire speech to emphasize how important it is to cast down their hatred and make amends with the white population. He not only tells the blacks to cast down, but he uses exemplification when speaks to the whites of the loyalty they have received from his people when he says, i.e., “Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the south” (450). He uses a metaphor to describe how difficult the road to success can, which every individual can relate to, including myself, i.e., “remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and productions of agricultural implements, buggies, steam engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles” (451). Then as he closes the speech, he gives one of the most extraordinary symbols when he says “here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of

the struggles of your race and mine,” as he uses alter as the symbol of the trials and extreme hardship his people and him have gone through. It shows the growth that has happened for an African American to stand before thousands and deliver such a moving speech to all. I can’t imagine the pure joy and hope that was portrayed amongst the faces of the black people, as he stood before them, the first African American ever to be recognized.
In conclusion, the speech had a major impact on the society as a whole. He received great applause from the people and gave hope to the African American people, while giving the white American population peace of mind. According to Historian David Levering Lewis, “Washington's message of modesty, rectitude, and service offered a soothing promise of social order and gradual change. Before long, though, other black leaders would assail Washington as an accommodationist and, ultimately, a traitor to the race” (American Radio Works, 2016). During that era, he was looked at as a national leader and hero and has now gone down in history as the most influential man of his time. His writings brought peace to many and his teachings impacted numerous young lives throughout his life.