The answer is option 3: <u>Washington promised to encourage African Americans to become skilled in common labor and not push for social equality. </u>
Booker T. Washington's accommodation strategy, expressed in his "Atlanta Compromise" (his speech at the opening of the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895), consisted of encouraging African Americans to accept discrimination and, instead, concentrate on educating themselves, gain farming and industrial skills, work hard and have patience, which eventually, would lead to the respect of whites toward them, and lead to African Americans being fully accepted as citizens and integrated into all strata of society.
For white southern businessmen and the plantation owners, who mostly were racists and firmly advocators of segregation, the speech didn't represent any threat to them since it didn't push for social equality and instead, it encouraged black people to work more.