Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are

In Washington’s “Up from Slavery,” Washington seems to be declaring that African-Americans should stay in the South. He never speaks against the North, but he praises the South, stating, “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.” He admits the South has problems, but with time, Booker declares, “Our beloved South [will become] a new heaven and a new earth.”
Throughout “Up from Slavery,” Washington seems to be very optimistic about race relations, one of the South’s main problems. He states several times that if whites and African-Americans work together, the South will develop into a region of great peace and prosperity. He urges whites to “cast down your bucket where you are,” and “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,” meaning that African-Americans will prove themselves to be sterling partners. He also encourages African-Americans to assist their white brothers. “We shall constitute once-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress,” Washington states, and the difference between these two means is either working together with whites or refusing cooperation.
Washington seems to be declaring to both races that despite its problems, the South is a place to stay in because an “interlacing [of] our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life” will occur “in a way that shall make the interests of both races one” if the two races work together.