Booker T. Washington, an educator and leader in the Black community, delivered his Atlanta Exposition Address late on a hot mid-September afternoon in 1895 to a standing-room-only crowd packed into Atlanta’s Exposition Park auditorium during the opening ceremonies of the Cotton States and International Exposition. The Atlanta Exposition Address, a speech that ran a little over ten minutes, propelled the previously unknown principal of Tuskegee Institute, a small Black college in rural Alabama, into the national spotlight. By almost any measure, it (along with Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech) was one of the most important speeches presented by an African American. The immediate response, both in Atlanta and across the country, was overwhelmingly positive.