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.
