Primary Source Documents After reading the three primary source documents labeled #1, write an essay that engages with how some Americans thought about race in the American South after the Civil War. What do these documents say about both white and Afric
. . . Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the
bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the polit-
ical convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
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.” . . . The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and
it came up full of fresh, sparkling water. . . . To those of my race who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly
relations with the southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, 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.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. . . . Our greatest
danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the
productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify
common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. . . . No race can prosper till it learns that
there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for
the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you
are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested
in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who
have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought
forth treasures from the bowels of the earth. . . . Casting down your bucket among my people . . . you will find that they
will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can
be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-
abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. . . . In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the
finders, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. . . .
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and
that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle
rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree
ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared
for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the
opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.