It was Booker T. Washington. He was the prevailing leader in the African-American communal. He was from the last generation of black American leaders born into oppression and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were once more oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Historian Eric Foner claims that the freedom movement of the late nineteenth century altered directions so as to make even with America's new economic and intellectual framework. Black leaders highlighted economic self-help and individual advancement into the middle class as a more fruitful approach than political agitation. There was importance on education and literacy throughout the period after the Civil War. Washington's famous Atlanta speech of 1895 marked this change, as it called on blacks to develop their farms, their industrial skills and their entrepreneurship as the next stage in emerging from slavery.
