Up from Slavery

Summary

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. He remembers a one-room cabin with a dirt floor at Hale's Ford, his mother cooking for the plantation, the torment of a new flax shirt that his brother John wore first to break it in for him, and the schoolhouse door he could not enter. At the end of the Civil War the slaves gather at the big house to hear a proclamation read, and his mother kisses her children, weeping for joy. The family moves to Malden, West Virginia, where the boy packs salt and works in a coal mine, learns his letters from a Webster's spelling book, chooses the surname Washington on his first day of school, and learns order and thoroughness as a houseboy for the exacting Mrs. Viola Ruffner. Hearing miners speak of Hampton Institute, he travels some five hundred miles in 1872, sleeping under a board sidewalk in Richmond, and is admitted after the head teacher, Miss Mary F. Mackie, has him sweep a recitation room; he sweeps it three times and dusts it four. At Hampton he works as janitor, learns the use of the bath, the toothbrush and the bedsheet, and comes under the influence of General Samuel C. Armstrong. After teaching at Malden, study in Washington, D.C., and work as housefather to Native American students at Hampton, he is sent in 1881 to open a normal school at Tuskegee, Alabama, where he begins on July 4 with thirty students in a shanty and a church. With Olivia A. Davidson, later his second wife, he buys an abandoned plantation, teaches students to build their own buildings, fails three times to burn a kiln of bricks, pawns his watch, and at last succeeds. Later chapters describe fund-raising among Northern donors such as Collis P. Huntington and Andrew Carnegie, the deaths of his first two wives, the invitation to speak at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta on 18 September 1895, the full text of that address with its counsel to cast down your bucket where you are, and the response of Grover Cleveland and the press. He sets out his rules for public speaking and health, describes a rest cure in Europe in 1899 that included tea with Queen Victoria, an honorary degree from Harvard in 1896 and President McKinley's visit to Tuskegee in 1898, and closes in Richmond, where he once slept under a sidewalk, as the guest of both races. The chapters first ran in The Outlook in 1900 and 1901 and were published as a book in 1901, with a preface acknowledging the help of Max Bennett Thrasher and an introduction by Walter H. Page.

Top Lessons

• Work done thoroughly is its own credential

  Washington is admitted to Hampton not by examination papers but by sweeping a room three times and dusting it four. The lesson runs through the book: the brick kiln that fails three times, the students who build their own beds, and the habit of finishing each day's work. He argues that excellence in common tasks wins respect that argument cannot.

• Refusing hatred

  In Chapter XI Washington says that he learned from General Armstrong that great men cultivate love and little men cherish hatred, and resolved never to let anyone degrade his soul by making him hate. He treats the refusal of bitterness as a moral discipline, not a political tactic alone.

• Obstacles as a measure of success

  Washington writes in Chapter II that success should be measured by the obstacles overcome, not the position reached. His own story, from a dirt floor to tea at Windsor Castle, is offered as evidence. He hopes the reader will judge others, and himself, by effort and growth rather than rank.

• Education of head, hand and heart

  Tuskegee joins academic study with trades, farming, cleanliness and chapel. Washington argues that a people newly freed must learn to own land, build houses and earn a living, and that labor done with skill is dignified. The Atlanta address turns this conviction into a public program.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Up from Slavery is a document of hygiene as moral and social reform. Washington says the bath, the toothbrush, the napkin and the bedsheet were among the most valuable things Hampton taught him, and at Tuskegee he made the gospel of the tooth-brush, a phrase he credits to General Armstrong, a condition of staying in school, along with regular bathing and sleeping between sheets. He describes the cornbread-and-pork diet and crowded one-room cabins of the Black Belt that he toured before opening the school. Olivia Davidson's history includes nursing a pupil with smallpox when no one else would and volunteering as a nurse in the Memphis yellow fever epidemic, presumably that of 1878, though she had never had the disease. Washington records the early deaths of his mother and of both his first wives, the second of whom he says wore herself out with work. In Chapters XV and XVI he sets out a layman's rules for health, such as tending small ills early, consulting a physician when sleep fails, short restorative naps, and finishing the day's work, and he describes the exhaustion that made him sleep fifteen hours a day on the voyage to Europe in 1899. These are personal observations, not clinical history.

• Chapter III

  At Hampton he learns the use of the bath, the toothbrush and sheets, and explains their value for health and self-respect.

• Chapter VIII

  Olivia Davidson's earlier service nursing a smallpox patient in Mississippi and offering herself as a yellow fever nurse in Memphis.

• Chapter XI

  The gospel of the tooth-brush and the teaching of bathing and sleeping between sheets at Tuskegee.

• Chapter XV

  Washington's rules for keeping body and nerves fit, his reliance on sleep as a warning sign, and his habit of short naps.

• Chapter XVI

  On the voyage to Europe he sleeps fifteen hours a day and first realizes how tired he is after eighteen years of work.