The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The success middle-class blacks desired for themselves and their children did not extend to far more numerous poor black workers excluded from segregated southern industries. Sarah Dudley Pettey, a leading spokeswoman for the striving North Carolina black middle class, highlighted the multiple fissures of American society when she praised black strikebreakers at Homestead as pioneers for a black industrial future. Like Booker T. Washington in a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, she offered black workers as an alternative to striking immigrants. Pettey and other middle-class blacks, however, bridled at Washington’s willingness to confine virtually all black education to vocational education. She accepted class barriers; she resisted racial barriers. The South that middle-class black North Carolinians imagined would reward the “Best People,” both black and white.