The most famous passage from Up from Slavery is the part of the Atlanta Exposition Address in which Washington uses a short allegory to capture the struggles of the Black community. He opens the allegory with a description of a ship lost at sea full of thirsty people:
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
It is not until the captain of the “friendly vessel” repeats to the captain of the lost ship to “cast down his buckets” where the boat is that the captain does so, finding that his ship had been floating on the drinkable fresh water of the Amazon River.
Washington goes on to share the meaning behind this allegory, comparing Black people to those aboard the lost ship and himself to the captain of the “friendly vessel” who knows the truth about how they will survive:
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbour, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.
Here Washington makes it clear that he believes Black people need to stop looking for freedom elsewhere and realize that they can find it where they already are. Rather than trying to escape “the Southern white man,” they can “cultivat[e] friendly relations” with him and—as Washington goes on to say later in the speech—rather than trying to escape the hard physical labor of slavery, Black people should embrace the very same type of labor (this time to benefit themselves). This allegory communicates the key tenets of Washington’s philosophy of racial progress—that it will happen gradually via hard work and positive race relations rather than by anger or political protest.
