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Political agitation, on the other hand, was for Washington a seductive temptation that drew southern blacks away from what he characterized as “the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and in securing property” (85). Washington believed that blacks and whites could be brought together through economic rather than social relations; that is, as blacks became more skilled as workers, their work would become more valued and appreciated by whites, despite their ingrained racial prejudice. That appreciation would over time evolve into respect, human nature overcoming social conditioning. “My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what colour of skin merit is found,” Washington observes at one point in Up From Slavery (154), and at another he discusses a speech that he had given summarizing the logic of his economic-social gospel:

In this address I said that the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence. I said that any individual who learned to do something better than anybody else—learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner—had solved his problem, regardless of the colour of his skin, and that in proportion as the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have, in the same proportion would he be respected. (202)