Post reconstruction with the advent of Black Codes and institutionalized sharecropping, what direction would most benefit Blacks best. Booker T. Washington was piler of the Black community and had the ear of White America,  he had established Tuskegee Institute which was the model for Black educational institutions in the south. Although later controversial, Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech was paramount for a Black man of this time period. Washington had the stage of all of America and he had to be succinct while living in a racialized world.  

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“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 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. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. 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; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful.”  Bold type mine. See resource @ Iowaculture.gov