1856-1915 · American educator and founding principal of Tuskegee Institute, born into slavery
About Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was born enslaved in Franklin County, Virginia, and after emancipation worked in West Virginia salt furnaces and coal mines while teaching himself to read. He studied at Hampton Institute under Samuel Chapman Armstrong, and in 1881 he became the founding principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, which he built into a leading school for Black teachers and tradesmen. After the Atlanta address he was the most influential Black American leader of his generation, an adviser to presidents and the author of Up from Slavery (1901).
“success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”
On 18 September 1895 the Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta, a fair meant to display the industrial recovery of the South thirty years after the Civil War. Its organizers, who had included a Negro Building among the exhibits, invited Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to speak at the opening ceremonies.
1901 (serialized 1900-01) · Early 20th Century · Memoir
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.