Booker T. Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery on a farm in Virginia. After emancipation, his family moved to West Virginia, where as a boy he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines and studied whenever he could. At sixteen he walked and worked his way to the Hampton Institute, where he paid for his schooling as a janitor. In 1881 he was chosen to lead a new school for Black students at Tuskegee, Alabama. Starting with a few students in a church building, he and his students built the campus with their own hands, making the bricks themselves, and Tuskegee became a leading college for teachers and skilled trades; George Washington Carver taught there. In his Atlanta Exposition Address of 1895 he urged Black Americans to build economic strength through education, work and property, while accepting segregation for the time. W. E. B. Du Bois and others criticized this approach and pressed for full civil and political rights. Washington's autobiography, Up from Slavery, became a bestseller. He died in 1915.

Booker T. Washington is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented in detail; he worked closely with Black church leaders. Source: Wikipedia