In this speech before an integrated audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1895, Booker T. Washington proposed a compromise by which African Americans would not agitate for social and political equality in return for the opportunity to acquire vocational training and participate in the economic development of the New South. The compromise won him the support of white industrialists, politicians, and philanthropists in the North and South. But his accommodating racial policy did little to improve the condition of African Americans. In the first decade of the twentieth century, a resurgence of racial violence led to nearly a thousand lynchings as well as race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); and Springfield, Illinois (1908).