The image is a ship’s crew, dying of thirst, told to let down the bucket where they already are, and finding the Amazon’s fresh water out in the salt sea. Washington used it to urge Black Southerners to build an economic life in the South, and to offer white listeners a bargain many of them heard as surrender. Du Bois called the bargain a compromise and spent his life against it. Both sentences are in this book. They do not agree.