Washington, Booker T.

Washington, Booker T. Click to enlarge

• Born: 5 April 1856
• Birthplace: Franklin County, Virginia
• Died: 14 November 1915
• Best Known As: First head of the Tuskegee Institute

Born a slave and deprived of any early education, Booker Taliaferro Washington nonetheless became America's foremost black educator of the early 20th century. He was the first teacher and principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, a school for African-Americans where he championed vocational training as a means for black self-reliance. A well-known orator, Washington also wrote a best-selling autobiography (Up From Slavery, 1901) and advised Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft on race relations. His rather flaccid nickname of "The Great Accommodator" provides a clue as to why he was later criticized by W. E. B. Du Bois and the N.A.A.C.P. Washington was principal of Tuskegee Institute from 1881 until his death in 1915; it was originally called the Normal School for Colored Teachers and is now known as Tuskegee University.

Washington's middle name was Taliaferro... According to the Tuskegee University website, Washington was married three times: to Fannie Smith from 1882 until her death in 1884; to Olivia Davis, from 1885 until her death in 1889; and Margaret Murray, from 1893 until his death in 1915... He was unrelated to President George Washington or botanist George Washington Carver... The Tuskegee Institute was the training ground for the Tuskegee Airmen, the famous all-black flying squadron of World War II.

Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915), educator, autobiographer, biographer, and race leader. Few public figures in African American life excite as much passion and misunderstanding as Booker Taliaferro Washington. Born a slave on a Virginia plantation in 1856, Washington rose to become the founder and driving force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington is such a compelling subject because he focuses our attention on issues of leadership and public visibility, the nature of work and how it impacts upon the quality of African American life, and the in ternecine struggles for power within the African American elite. In the late 1980s, many began to view Washington as a man of skewed racial allegiances, a figure for whom white approval was everything. This interpretation of his life, however, relies on Washington's public persona to substantiate its claims. What is very clear is that Booker T. Washington was a man of such complexity that his public guise fails to provide sufficient cause to dismiss his importance.

Though Washington was born a slave, the scope and influence of his public life in the twentieth century rival that of Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century. Though his career as racial spokesman was based on the idea that African Americans should eschew political agitation for civil rights in favor of industrial education and agricultural expertise, Washington's secret activities, his attempt to exercise private influence on matters having to do with racial discrimination and segregation, suggest that his was a paradoxical life indeed. For how else are we to account for Washington's “Atlanta Exposition Address” of 1895 and his attempts to challenge racial discrimination and segregated facilities by covert legal means?

To penetrate the mysteries swirling about the persona of Booker T. Washington, we must understand something of the times in which he lived and why the issues of African American leadership-who would lead and what kinds of political spoils they could garner for the African American community—played such an essential role in the African American's attempt to participate fully in American life. For Washington, participation meant identifying, and being identified with, the status quo, the dominant way of thinking in American life and culture. Thus, as Sheldon Avery has observed, Washington's positions on laissez-faire capitalism, Christian morality, and middle-class values allowed him to channel a large portion of white philanthropic dollars and black patronage through the Tuskegee machine.

If Washington's racial accommodationism is unpalatable, it needs to be understood in light of his beginnings in West Virginia. As the son of Jane Ferguson, a slave, and a white father whom he never knew (though he conjectures in his autobiography that his father was his master), Washington sought to convey that his childhood had been one of poverty, not racial oppression. From working in the coal furnaces and salt mines of West Virginia to doing housework, Washington's insistence is that he achieved his position as racial spokesman through hard physical labor. He goes to great lengths, for example, to describe his admittance into Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1872 as the result of his ability to clean and dust a classroom. It is clear that Hampton would have a profound impact on Washington's views, for it was there he met General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who would become his mentor and benefactor. Graduating from Hampton in 1875 with honors, Washington returned to Hampton briefly after two years of teaching back in his native West Virginia to implement a program for Native Americans. In 1881 Armstrong recommended Washington to the Alabama legislature, which was seeking to open a normal school for African American students in Tuskegee.

The Booker T. Washington who thus emerges in Up from Slavery (1901) is a humble, moral, disciplined man whose life is devoted to the improvement of the Negro. And it is Tuskegee Institute, where he served as principal from 1881 until his death in 1915, that best demonstrates these traits. Culminating with his speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, and his honorary degree from Harvard in 1897, Washington's treatment of his life is characterized by his ability to hold the most unassuming exchange up as a shining example of his links to the working man. Though Washington would endear himself to industrialists like Andrew Carnegic and John D. Rockefeller (at least in part because of his antiunion stancé), he nonetheless claimed to champion the cause of economic opportunity for all.

Washington's career in the public sphere seems to grow from his success at Tuskegee, but it is just as much a result of the profound link between his life as an educator and fundraiser and his writing, for it is Washington's ability to control his image by recycling the positive assessments of his work into his books that makes him a credible public figure. Between 1896 and 1913 Washington produced nearly twenty works ranging from his two autobiographies, The Story of My Life and Work (1900) and the aforementioned Up from Slavery, to a biography of Frederick Douglass (1907). Moreover, it could be argued that Washington was one of the first African American writers to connect the “self-help” book to issues of African American citizenship, which explains titles like Working with the Hands, Putting the Most into Life, and Sowing and Reaping.

Though Washington depicts himself as the primary voice of the African American community, it is important to point out that there were alternatives to Washington's accommodationist philosophy. W. E. B. Du Bois and newspaper editor Monroe Trotter insisted upon a much more radical and confrontational stance than that put forward by Washington. With his propensity to see himself as the power to whom all other African American leaders should bow, Washington was often highly intolerant of other points of view, especially those that threatened his ability to keep close counsel with white philanthropic and political interests. Indeed, when the Niagara movement began to gain momentum in 1905, Washington used his influence with black newspaper editors, none of whom wished to risk openly repudiating Washington's policies, to get them to either ignore or belittle the movement. And yet, his heavy-handedness notwithstanding, Washington's quest for power was not without its success. He devoted a considerable amount of time, financial resources, and energy to defeating Jim Crow in the courts of the United States. Indeed, he and Du Bois, publicly in disagreement, collaborated as late as 1904 in an attempt to challenge the public statutes upholding separate-but-equal arrangements. In 1907 they co-authored a study entitled The Negro in the South. Though the attempt to achieve a judicial remedy for Jim Crow failed, Washington originated a highly secret, well-maintained apparatus by which to affect the legal fortunes of southern blacks, one that other black leaders were forced to acknowledge. Though the Tuskegee machine was well known to whites as a smoothly running, innocuous vehicle, insufficient and, more importantly, ill-suited to mount a serious challenge to white hegemony, Washington's ability to dissemble, to make racial equality his ultimate concern, means he cannot be dismissed.

Bibliography

• August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915, 1963.
• Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901, 1972. Hugh Hawkins, ed., Booker T. Washington and His Critics, 1974.
• Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, 1983. Louis R. Harlan et al., eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, 1972–1989.
• David L. Dudley, My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography, 1991. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, ed. William L. Andrews, 1995.
• Houston A. Baker, Turning South Again: ReThinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T., 2000

Herman Beavers

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915), African American educator and racial leader, founded Tuskegee Institute for black students. His "Atlanta Compromise" speech made him America's major black leader for 20 years.

Booker Taliaferro (the Washington was added later) was born a slave in Franklin County, Va., on April 5, 1856. His mother was the plantation's cook. His father, a local white man, took no responsibility for him. His mother married another slave, who escaped to West Virginia during the Civil War. She and her three children were liberated by a Union army in 1865 and, after the war, joined her husband.

Growing Up Black

The stepfather put the boys to work in the salt mines in Malden, W.Va. Booker eagerly asked for education, but his stepfather conceded only when Booker agreed to toil in the mines mornings and evenings to make up for earnings lost while in school. He had known only his first name, but when pupils responded to roll call with two names, Booker desperately added a famous name, becoming Booker Washington. Learning from his mother that he already had a last name, he became Booker T. Washington.

Overhearing talk about a black college in Hampton, Va., Washington longed to go. Meanwhile, as houseboy for the owner of the coal mines and saltworks, he developed scrupulous work habits. In 1872 he set out for Hampton Institute. When his money gave out, he worked at odd jobs. Sleeping under wooden sidewalks, begging rides, and walking, he traveled the remaining 80 miles and, bedraggled and penniless, asked for admission and assistance. After Hampton officials tested him by having him clean a room, he was admitted and given work as a janitor.

Hampton Institute, founded in 1868 by a former Union general, emphasized manual training. The students learned useful trades and earned their way. Washington studied brickmasonry along with collegiate courses. Graduating in 1876, he taught in a rural school for two years. Studying at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., he became disenchanted with classical education, considering his fellow students to be dandies more interested in making an impression and living off the black masses than in serving mankind. He became convinced that practical, manual training in rural skills and crafts would save his race, not higher learning divorced from the reality of the black man's downtrodden existence. In 1879 he was invited to teach at Hampton Institute, particularly to supervise 100 Native Americans admitted experimentally. He proved a great success in his two years on the faculty.

Tuskegee Institute

In 1881 citizens in Tuskegee, Ala., asked Hampton's president to recommend a white man to head their new black college; he suggested Washington instead. The school had an annual legislative appropriation of $2, 000 for salaries, but no campus, buildings, pupils, or staff. Washington had to recruit pupils and teachers and raise money for land, buildings, and equipment. Hostile rural whites who feared education would ruin black laborers accepted his demonstration that his students' practical training would help improve their usefulness. He and his students built a kiln and made the bricks with which they erected campus buildings.

Under Washington's leadership (1881-1915), Tuskegee Institute became an important force in black education. Tuskegee pioneered in agricultural extension, sending out demonstration wagons that brought better methods to farmers and sharecroppers. Graduates founded numerous "little Tuskegees." African Americans mired in the poverty and degradation of cotton sharecropping improved their farming techniques, income, and living conditions. Washington urged them to become capitalists, founding the National Negro Business League in 1900. Black agricultural scientist George Washington Carver worked at Tuskegee from 1896 to 1943, devising new products from peanuts and sweet potatoes. By 1915 Tuskegee had 1, 500 students and a larger endowment than any other black institution.

"Atlanta Compromise"

In 1895 Washington gave his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech. Although he shared the late Frederick Douglass's long-range goals of equality and integration, Washington renounced agitation and protest tactics. He urged blacks to subordinate demands for political and social rights, concentrating instead on improving job skills and usefulness. "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house, " he said. He appealed to white people to rely on loyal, proven black workers, pointing out that the South would advance to the degree that blacks were allowed to secure education and become productive.

Washington's position so pleased whites, North and South, that they made him the new black spokesman. He became powerful, having the deciding voice in Federal appointments of African Americans and in philanthropic grants to black institutions. Through subsidies or secret partnerships, he controlled black newspapers, stifling critics. Overawed by his power and hoping his tactics would work, many blacks went along. However, increasingly during his last years, such black intellectuals as W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope, and William Monroe Trotter denounced his surrender of civil rights and his stressing of training in crafts, some obsolete, to the neglect of liberal education. Opposition centered in the Niagara Movement, founded in 1905, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which succeeded it in 1910.

Although outwardly conciliatory, Washington secretly financed and encouraged attempts and lawsuits to block southern moves to disfranchise and segregate blacks. He had lost two wives by death and married a third time in 1893. His death on Nov. 14, 1915, cleared the way for blacks to return to Douglass's tactics of agitating for equal political, social, and economic rights. Washington won a Harvard honorary degree in 1891. His birthplace is a national monument.

Further Reading

Washington's autobiographical works are The Story of My Life and Work (1900), Up from Slavery (1901), and My Larger Education (1911), the last two especially revealing. Collections of his writings along with contemporary opinions are Hugh Hawkins, ed., Booker T. Washington and His Critics (1962), and Emma Lou Thornbrough, ed., Booker T. Washington (1969). There are three major biographies: Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe, Booker T. Washington (1916), an unscholarly glorification, is useful because Scott was Washington's assistant; Basil Mathews, Booker T. Washington: Educator and Interracial Interpreter (1948), is also highly laudatory; Samuel R. Spencer, Jr., Booker T. Washington and the Negro's Place in American Life (1955), the most balanced account is still not sufficiently critical of Washington. The best account of Washington's times is August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (1963).

educator; activist; writer

Personal Information

Born April 5, 1856, near Hale's Ford, Franklin County, VA; died November 14, 1915, in Tuskegee, AL; son of an enslaved mother and a white father; married Fannie N. Smith, 1882 (died, 1884); married Olivia A. Davidson, 1885 (died, 1889); married Margaret James Murray, 1893; children: Booker T., Jr., Ernest Davidson, Portia Marshall.
Education: Received degree from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 1875.

Career

Educator, social activist, and writer. Teacher in schools in Malden, WV, 1875-78, and at Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA, 1879-81; Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee Institute), Tuskegee, AL, cofounder, principal, and professor, 1881-1915. Organized first annual Tuskegee Negro Conference, 1892, and National Negro Business League, 1900; representative and speaker at Cotton States and International Exposition, 1895; adviser to U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt.

Life's Work

In the annals of African American history, few names are as celebrated or as controversial as that of Booker Taliaferro Washington. Washington emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century as the most important black leader since the post-Civil War Reconstruction--a period of transition during which the Southern states, then occupied by Northern troops, were reintegrated into the Union.

Washington was an educator admired by blacks and trusted by both northern and southern whites as a thoughtful, honorable, and articulate spokesperson for African Americans. The founder and for many years the president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he was an untiring promoter of the virtues of economic independence, thrift, hard work, and patience on the part of black Americans facing the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of survival in a white-ruled society.

Washington's own life was an outstanding example of his philosophy of deference and self-help. He was granted unique power by white political and economic leaders while suffering harsh condemnation during his life--and even after his death--by some blacks who perceived him as little more than a well-educated "Uncle Tom" (a negative name given to blacks who appeared overly eager to cooperate with white authority). Some critics have indicated that Washington's philosophy of economic self-reliance was hopelessly outdated even during his own lifetime, but he was widely regarded as the best-known and most powerful black American from 1895 until his death in 1915.

Booker T. Washington was born in the spring of 1856 near Hale's Ford, Virginia, the son of a slave named Jane who belonged to James Burroughs and served as cook for the Burroughs family and their slaves. The identity of Washington's father is not certain, but he was most likely a white man living in the immediate area. As Washington later recounted in his famous autobiography, Up From Slavery , his first years were spent in a single-room cabin on Burroughs's farm, where he and his siblings were put to work at an early age. Young Booker (his only name at that time) was allowed no education and did not even own a pair of shoes until the age of eight, at which time he was often employed at the Burroughses' dining table as the operator of a contraption designed to shoo flies away from the food. There, Booker received an introduction to white society, etiquette, and more or less cultured conversation, all of which would prove of lasting importance in the course of his life.

With the defeat of the South at the close of the Civil War in 1865, Booker's stepfather, a former slave named Washington Ferguson, traveled to the town of Malden, West Virginia, where he had found work in the salt furnaces of Kanawha Salines. Jane, who had married Ferguson while still a slave in Virginia, and the rest of the family joined him there the same year. Soon young Booker was working alongside Ferguson in the salt furnaces, and later he was forced to labor in the local coal mines; but, as Washington wrote in his autobiography, "From the time that I can remember having any thoughts about anything, I recall that I had an intense desire to learn to read." It was in Malden that Booker received his first classroom education, squeezing in a few hours every day or night at the local school for black children while continuing to work full time in the mines. When asked by his first teacher for his name, the ten-year-old replied, "Booker Washington," taking as his last name the first name of his stepfather; only years later did he add the name of Taliaferro.

While at work in the coal mines, Washington one day overheard discussion of a school for blacks called Hampton Institute, and the youngster promptly determined that he would seek a formal education there. Before going to Hampton, Washington worked for a second time in the home of a white family, in this case as a houseboy for General Lewis Ruffner and his wife, Viola, owners of the local mines. With the encouragement of Mrs. Ruffner and the financial help of many local black residents, Washington was able to enroll at Hampton Institute in the fall of 1872.

Located in Hampton, Virginia, the Normal and Agricultural Institute had been founded three years before by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the son of white missionaries stationed in Hawaii, for the purpose of educating black schoolteachers in the habits of thrift, industry, and practical know-how. These qualities formed the core of the general's philosophy concerning education for African Americans. Armstrong and his institute were the models upon which Booker T. Washington molded his own life and work, and there is little in the career of Washington that cannot be traced back to his experience at Hampton.

Hampton students were given a book education sufficient to allow them to teach elementary school, but the essence of Armstrong's program was the development of a strong moral character and work ethic. All Hampton students were required to pay their tuition in the form of work, and life at the school was regulated with an almost military discipline. Armstrong believed that the newly freed black peoples would find a place in American society only when they had demonstrated flawless moral integrity and could offer a usable product or service. He viewed as secondary the issues of black civil and political rights, believing that these would inevitably follow upon the economic self-sufficiency of the race. Armstrong's was an inherently conservative doctrine--its goal being the formation of an equal society of black farmers and artisans--and Booker Washington never deviated from its basic tenets.

Laboring as a janitor and engaging in whatever additional summer work he could find, Washington made his way through Hampton Institute in three years, from 1872 to 1875. He returned to Malden, West Virginia, for a brief term as a local teacher and was then invited back to Hampton to serve as one of General Armstrong's instructors. When Armstrong was asked in 1881 to create a new and similar school in Tuskegee, Alabama, he recommended Washington, who was accepted by the Alabama legislature and moved to Tuskegee in June of that year.

Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute was built by Washington literally from the ground up: upon his arrival in Tuskegee, he had nothing but a $2,000 grant from the state for salaries and permission to build a training school for black teachers. After a tour of Alabama communities to gauge the region's most immediate needs, Washington enrolled the first year's class in a shanty loaned by a local church. He eventually borrowed enough money to purchase an old plantation and begin the daunting task of establishing school buildings on the institute's permanent site. Until Washington's death in 1915, Tuskegee Institute would remain the chief occupation and pride of his life, and the town of Tuskegee the unofficial capital of black America.

In every important respect Tuskegee Institute closely resembled General Armstrong's Hampton school. Although Tuskegee trained young black men and women to be teachers, it also insisted that they participate in one of the institute's many and ongoing industrial projects, whether it be the construction of school buildings or the fabrication of such articles as bricks and mattresses for sale to market. As a provider of what was called "industrial education," however, Tuskegee's emphasis was heavily directed toward agriculture and artisan skills, reflecting Washington's belief that blacks first needed to establish their economic independence and security. Tuskegee students were exhorted to lead lives of modesty and hard work in accord with the dominant white southern culture, leaving the questions of political power and civil status to be answered by the gradual reconciliation of the races.

At a time of white southern resentment and retaliation for the more radical forms of postwar Reconstruction, Washington's program of black self-help was applauded by both races--and most crucially by southern white leaders and northern philanthropists. The former allowed Tuskegee to grow into an institution of imposing size and power, the latter provided the funds required to do so.

With important help from General Armstrong, Washington became a well-known figure in the national debate over race and the future of black Americans. His position as black leader was solidified in the year 1895, when he was asked by the organizers of the Cotton States and International Exposition to deliver an address as a black representative to their industrial fair in Atlanta. The event was of unprecedented significance in the history of postwar southern racial politics, and Washington used the opportunity to present in especially eloquent form his philosophy of harmony through economic cooperation. His appeal was doubly appreciated at the exposition, as it promised both racial calm and much needed economic vitality in the impoverished South.

Washington was given a spectacular ovation after the speech. The event was covered by newspapers around the country, and he was rapidly honored in both business and political circles as an eminently practical African American activist and leader. Funds poured into Tuskegee, and Washington became the confidante of philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and the adviser to President Theodore Roosevelt on questions of the South and racial relations in general.

Washington was married in 1882 to Fannie N. Smith, whom he had met and courted in Malden, West Virginia. Following her death in 1884, he wed Olivia A. Davidson, whom he credited with much of Tuskegee's success in fund-raising. Washington's third wife, Margaret James Murray, exercised considerable influence at Tuskegee as well, and she also helped Washington to raise his children from his first two marriages. His busy life was divided between the administration of Tuskegee, writing books and articles, and an endless round of travel and lectures. As a man of limitless energy but sharply defined goals, he became a highly influential black leader.

Washington wielded power directly by means of Tuskegee's many graduates, his role as counselor to the federal government, and as part-owner of the New York Age , an influential black newspaper. More generally, he was the chief arbiter between the black community and the centers of national power in New York and Washington, D.C., and he was inevitably consulted by white leaders in questions of philanthropy and interracial politics. Under the Republican presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, Washington reached the pinnacle of his national power, perhaps best symbolized by an invitation to dine with the president at the White House in October of 1901.

In 1900 Washington helped organize the National Negro Business League, an effort, as its name suggests, at helping black Americans to develop their own commercial ventures. He toured the continent of Europe, received honorary degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth universities, and published several versions of his autobiography, Up From Slavery. Yet there were already signs of disillusionment among black intellectuals.

In 1902, editor William Monroe Trotter began publishing virulent attacks on Washington in his Boston Guardian. The following year black leader W. E. B. Du Bois weighed in with his justly celebrated Souls of Black Folk, in which he protested: "[In cases where] Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice North and South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effect of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds ... we must unceasingly and firmly oppose [him]." Du Bois was a passionate political activist and a leading intellectual whose temperament and opinions were at the furthest extreme from Washington's hard-headed pragmatism. Opposing Washington's emphasis on vocational training, Du Bois urged blacks to pursue higher education and employ political agitation in order to achieve equality.

Du Bois's writings accurately reflected the desperate condition of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, when it could have been argued that blacks were indeed worse off than in the era of slavery. Nearly every state in the South had managed to prevent blacks from exercising the right to vote granted them by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With the help of terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the South had restored absolute segregation between the races. Worst of all were the lynchings of blacks that occurred with appalling regularity during the years of Washington's reign as a leader among African Americans. Whether the connection was valid or not, some black intellectuals believed Washington's philosophy of humility and political acquiescence contributed to the generally deteriorating welfare of black Americans.

In response, Du Bois and other concerned blacks founded the Niagara Movement in 1905 as a direct challenge to Washington's power, and five years later many of the same individuals created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the same time, Washington's national influence declined after 1908 under the administrations of U. S. presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. Despite his continued fame and prestige, he must have sensed that a new era in black American history was about to begin. As Du Bois and others pointed out, Washington's dream of racial equality via the economic independence of blacks was impossible so long as blacks lacked the capacity to protest at the ballot box. Furthermore, the Tuskegee emphasis on small-scale farming and artisan skills was of little use at a time of exploding industrialization; jobs were now in the cities of the North, and increasing numbers of blacks abandoned their southern roots to seek their fortunes in the North.

Washington died in November of 1915 at his home in Tuskegee, one of the most honored men of his age, and one of the most complex. Historians have discovered in his voluminous private correspondence that Washington's apparent conservatism was in part only a mask for the benefit of his white audience. Washington secretly funded numerous court challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement, and in many instances took pains to conceal acts of generosity to blacks that might have been construed by whites as too radical.

In every sense, then, Washington's life and work--the story of his personal rise from slavery, the creation of Tuskegee, and the millions of dollars he raised for the material betterment of black Americans--were remarkable. His philosophy and policies, however, were limited by the prevailing attitudes of his day and therefore failed to anticipate the political and economic changes that would engulf his people later in the twentieth century.

Awards

Received honorary degrees from Harvard University, 1896, and Dartmouth College, 1901.

Works

Writings

• Black-Belt Diamonds: Gems From the Speeches, Addresses, and Talks to the Students of Booker T. Washington, Fortune & Scott, 1898.
• The Future of the American Negro, Small, Maynard, 1899.
• (With Edgar Webber) The Story of My Life and Work (autobiography), J. L. Nichols, 1900.
• (With Max Bennett Thrasher) Up From Slavery (autobiography), A. L. Burt, 1901.
• Character Building (lectures), Doubleday, 1902.
• Working With the Hands (autobiography), Doubleday, 1904.
• (Editor with Emmett J. Scott) Tuskegee and Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements, Appleton, 1905.
• The Negro in Business, Hertel, Jenkins, 1907.
• (With S. Laing Williams) Frederick Douglass (biography), G. W. Jacobs, 1907.
• (With W. E. B. Du Bois) The Negro in the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development (lectures), G. W. Jacobs, 1907.
• The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race From Slavery, 2 volumes, Doubleday, 1909.
• (With Robert E. Park and Emmett J. Scott) My Larger Education (autobiography), Doubleday, 1911.
• Selected Speeches of Booker T. Washington, edited by E. Davidson Washington, Doubleday, 1932.
• The Booker T. Washington Papers, thirteen volumes, edited by Louis R. Harlan and others, University of Illinois Press, 1972-84.

Further Reading

Books

• Drinker, Frederick E., Booker T. Washington: The Master Mind of a Child of Slavery, Greenwood, 1970.
• Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, Library of America edition, Vintage Books, 1990.
• Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, sixth edition, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
• Harlan, Louis R., Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901, Oxford University Press, 1972.
• Harlan, Louis R., Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915, Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Kaye, Tony, Booker T. Washington, Chelsea House, 1989.
• Meier, August, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington, University of Michigan Press, 1963.
• Thornbrough, Emma Lou, editor, Booker T. Washington, Prentice-Hall, 1969.
• Washington, Booker T., Up From Slavery, Penguin, 1986.
• Weisberger, Bernard A., Booker T. Washington, New American Library, 1972.

• American Heritage, August 1968.
• Crisis, August 1978; February 1983.
• Journal of Negro History, January 1953; October 1955; January 1958; April 1960; April 1968; July 1969.
• New York Times Book Review, March 4, 1973; May 22, 1983.
• Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 1973; November 15, 1974.

— Jonathan Martin

For more information on Booker Taliaferro Washington, visit Britannica.com.

(1856-1915), educator. Across the landscape of the most anguished era of American race relations (1895-1915) strode the self-assured and influential Booker T. Washington. The foremost black educator, power broker, and institution builder of his time, Washington in 1881 founded Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama devoted to industrial and moral education and to the training of public school teachers. From his southern small-town base, he created a national political network of schools, newspapers, and the National Negro Business League (founded in 1901). In response to the age of Jim Crow, Washington offered the doctrine of accommodation, acquiescing in social and political inequality for blacks while training them for economic self-determination in the industrial arts.

Born a slave on a small farm in western Virginia, Washington was nine years old when the Civil War ended. His humble but stern rearing included his working in a salt furnace when he was ten and serving as a houseboy for a white family where he first learned the virtues of frugality, cleanliness, and personal morality. Washington was educated at Hampton Institute, one of the earliest freedmen's schools devoted to industrial education; Hampton was the model upon which he based his institute in Tuskegee. Growing up during Reconstruction and imbued with moral as opposed to intellectual training, he came to believe that postwar social uplift had begun at the wrong end: the acquisition of political and civil rights rather than economic self-determination.

Washington's philosophy and the "Tuskegee machine" won him widespread support among northern white philanthropists as well as acclaim among blacks. In his Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, he struck the keynotes of racial accommodationism: "Cast down your buckets where you are," Washington urged blacks. "In all things that are purely social," he announced to attentive whites, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." His thoroughly bourgeois, antilabor, antidemocratic appeal stood for years as an endorsement of segregation. He sustained his power as an educational statesman by some ruthless and duplicitous methods. Rival black newspapers, educators, and thinkers were frequently intimidated by his brand of boss politics. Black newspaper editors and aspiring young intellectuals risked ostracism and unemployment if they embraced political activism rather than Washington's accommodationist social policy. Such disputes surfaced especially in the famous debate between Washington andW. E. B. Du Bois over the aims of "industrial" as opposed to "classical" education among blacks.

Growing black and white opposition to Washington's acquiescence in disfranchisement and Jim Crow led to the formation of the Niagara Movement (1905-1909) and the naacp, activist organizations working for civil and political rights as well as against lynching. Ironically, Washington also labored secretly against Jim Crow laws and racial violence, writing letters in code names and protecting blacks from lynch mobs, though these efforts were rarely known in his own time.

Washington was a pragmatist who engaged in deliberate ambiguity in order to sustain white recognition of his leadership. Such visibility won him international fame and the role of black adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. His widely read autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), stands as a classic in the genre of narratives by American self-made men, as well as the prime source for Washington's social and historical philosophy. His racial philosophy did not long survive his death, but in theory and practice, his views on economic self-reliance have remained one of the deepest strains in Afro-American thought.

Bibliography:

Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 2 vols. (1972, 1984).

Author:

David W. Blight

See also Du Bois, W. E. B.; Fortune, T. Thomas; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Niagara Movement; Reconstruction; Segregation; Suffrage.

Born a slave on a Virginia plantation five years before the Civil War began, Booker T. Washington's professional life as an educator and leader of African-American interests demonstrates how education, race, public policy, and politics intersected in the United States during the late nineteenth century. Washington's career placed him at the center of a debate among African Americans about the proper path to full citizenship and complete participation in American society economically, politically, and socially.

He was also the instrument of elite white industrialists such as George Foster Peabody, William H. Baldwin Jr., and Robert C. Ogden. They shaped the shift in black American educational focus from universal, state-supported public education with its liberal arts component to an industrial education, a move that accommodated their aims for national industrialization and southern white planters' demands for a subservient African-American working class. As a result of his collaboration, Washington became the primary exponent of white philanthropic - industrial efforts to channel African-American and working-class white education to meet the needs of industrial America. The words Industrial education and Washington became synonymous between his 1895 Atlanta Cotton Exposition Speech and death in 1915. The legacy of Washington's educational philosophy continues to be the source of an early-twenty-first-century debate among African Americans who attempt to reconcile questions of how education must lead the black working class to life as middle-class Americans. This debate also seeks to ensure that the majority of African-American working people obtain access to a better life with mass education as the primary path to modernization and the technology that transforms black political, economic, and social status in the United States.

Early Years

Booker T. Washington was born to a slave mother and "unknown" father near Hales Ford, Virginia, on James Burroughs's plantation in 1856. He survived chattel slavery and the Civil War. He moved with his mother and siblings to West Virginia to join his step-father, a Union Army veteran. Living under impoverished circumstances, Washington worked in the local salt mines to assist the family. He attended night school initially and eventually obtained permission from his stepfather to go to the day school while he worked from 4 A.M. to 9 in the mines. Employed as a houseboy by General Lewis Ruffner, he furthered his early education under Mrs. Viola Knapp Ruffner, a former governess and schoolteacher.

The major transformative event, however, in Washington's personal education occurred at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, under the direction of former Union Army General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the school's founder. At Hampton, Washington absorbed Armstrong's industrial education philosophy of manual labor, trade training, economic development, self-help, and normal school training. After brief sojourns in black higher education in Washington, D.C., at Howard University and exploration of the ministry, Washington returned to Hampton Institute to teach. Armstrong recommended his protégé, Washington noted, to a "group of white Alabama gentlemen" in Tuskegee, Alabama, who endeavored to open a school similar to the Hampton model (Washington 1965, p. 82). Washington accepted their invitation to lead this normal and industrial institution.

In 1881 Washington began organizing and building Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, literally from the ground up. His leadership of Tuskegee Institute from 1881 to 1915 would elevate him from obscurity to national prominence. He became not only a leader in black education, but also a patron of such industrialists and education philanthropists as Andrew Carnegie; George Foster Peabody; Charles D. McIver, president of the Southern Education Association; and Edgar Gardner Murphy, racial moderate and distinguished southern educator. Washington also advised U.S. presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. With these associates and supporters Washington amassed enough political power to become the most powerful southern politician of his era, 1895 to 1915.

The Black Commitment to Free Education

The emancipated slaves, including Washington, looked to education in 1865 to define their newly earned freedom and citizenship. According to education historian James D. Anderson, black people emerging from slavery committed themselves to universal, state-supported public education. It continued a tradition developed in slavery among African Americans that the ability to read and write were important skills within the slave community. Blacks held in high esteem fellow slaves and free blacks who had mastered literacy. Even Washington, a critic of slaves and black working-class behavior and goals, acknowledged that freedom was a "great responsibility" and that slaves realized they had "to think and plan for themselves and their children" including "the question … of a school … for colored children" (Washington 1965, pp. 27 - 28, 32). Education meant self-reliance, self-determination, and the right to control the institutions of education for their benefit. According to William Channing, an American Missionary Association teacher from New England, black people sought free public education that included white assistance but not white control - seemingly contradictory concepts. Black people challenged white planter repugnance against state government control of the education of all children, especially slaves. African Americans contested the rationale of a society that used the law to prohibit reading and writing. Black educator and Booker T. Washington's political rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, asserted that free public education for all citizens in the South was "a Negro idea," proposed by enslaved blacks as a condition of freedom.

Washington observed that black slaves and ex-slaves were determined to educate themselves by securing their own teachers and even paying "for school as best they could" (Washington 1965, p. 33). They made this commitment long before white and black northern American Missionary Association teachers came south during the Civil War. These efforts at self-education served as a foundation for universal schooling as slaves and ex-slaves organized and willingly taxed themselves to keep the private schools they founded on their own initiative. At the beginning of Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau took control of some of these schools founded by slaves. In 1866 the Freedmen's Bureau in Louisiana failed to force blacks to retake responsibility for administering education for African Americans. Blacks in Georgia in 1865 created a free system of schools. Sabbath schools were also free and operated in black churches stressing literacy. Black student enrollment increased in Sabbath schools in the 1870s and 1880s, demonstrating the African-American commitment to free education and literacy. The ability to read and write was a key to black freedom. These skills helped African Americans secure jobs and direct their access to upward mobility. Literacy ensured that ex-slaves could defend their economic rights in written contracts as well as acquire land, the main symbol of freedom.

Black people attained universal, state-supported public education through a union of African Americans and radical members of the Republican Party. Conservative Republicans and southern Democrats opposed universal education. Black Republicans at southern constitutional conventions during Reconstruction, between 1865 and 1868, institutionalized free public education based on state-supported taxation. By 1870 the eleven states of the former Confederacy had installed constitutions that established free education as a basic citizenship right.

Emancipated blacks also viewed education as the key to political, economic, and personal independence. They pursued education to learn how to organize themselves and build institutions they controlled. To achieve this they sought training and development of their intellectual and leadership capacities. In this context, Anderson notes, "black leaders and educators adopted the New England classical liberal curriculum" (p. 28). After attaining political power in 1895, Booker T. Washington objected to classical education for the general black population on the grounds that it was "impractical"; however, working-class African Americans in Alabama and across the south insisted that blacks needed classical, common school, normal, and industrial education to ensure the advancement of the race to full citizenship in the United States.

White southern planters and merchants used their control over land, labor, housing, and wages to undermine universal, state-supported public education. This class had opposed state-supported public education for the working classes (white people who were not part of the landed elite) before the Civil War. The planters, Anderson asserts, "did not believe in giving the Negro any education" (p. 22). Any degree of education eroded the planter's ability to exploit black labor "upon which their agrarian order depended" (p. 23). Southern white leaders used labor to prevent black children from attending school after the Civil War. Between 1869 and 1877 the planters and merchants ousted African-American legislators from southern state governments. The planters and merchants, armed with political power that gave them a dominant position in state government, dismantled universal, state-supported public education utilizing state authority, economic intimidation, and violence. By legal means, white opponents of universal education lowered taxation, challenged compulsory attendance laws, and prevented the passage of new laws that could have reinforced free public education. The planters and merchants wanted to restore slavery and their domination of all societal institutions, which were undermined by the Civil War, Reconstruction, northern capital investment in the south, and the centralization of federal power.

No white group challenged white planter-merchant class antipublic education policies between 1865 and 1880. Beginning in the late 1880s, however, white Populists and Progressive-era reformers who followed the Populists questioned the planter-merchant vision of limiting white working-class education. As the nineteenth century drew to a close white people were forced by black agitation to confront their conflicting views of universal, state-supported public education.

Industrial Education

Industrial education introduced northern educators, industrialists, philanthropists, and Booker T. Washington into the debate between African-Americans' universal, state-supported public education and the white planter-merchant class's efforts to reconstruct antebellum slavery. The partnership formed by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Washington at Hampton Institute in the 1870s was part of a broader northern industrial-capital campaign to undercut black adaptation of the New England classical curriculum. The Hampton Institute was not envisioned as an industrial education institution. It was a normal school dedicated to training teachers, such as Washington, who would teach black workers and prepare them for their "place" in the South after Reconstruction. The institute was additionally part of a national movement focused on technological, trade, and manual education for the general American population. Although Hampton focused on teacher training, industrial education as it was originally defined did not involve teacher preparation.

There were three primary areas of vocational training that defined industrial education in the latter part of the nineteenth century. One area was collegiate training in applied science and technology to educate engineers, architects, chemists, and other professionals to work in the newly emerging technologically based twentieth-century economy. A second area encompassed trade schools that taught labor supervision and management. The third area supplemented the academic curriculum to modify or transform the behavior of working people from sloth to "habits of industry," thrift, and morality.

General Armstrong's Hampton Institute was founded in 1868. It utilized daily manual labor as the base of its normal school training. Armstrong wrongly assumed that the newly freed black people had to be guided and controlled because they were incapable of "self-direction" due to slavery's destruction of their minds and moral compasses. He hoped Hampton Institute might train black teachers who would impart the lessons of "work habits, practical knowledge, Christian morality, and acceptance of a subservient role" (Anderson, p. 35) in the post-Reconstruction southern household. Washington completed Hampton's curriculum and became the chief disciple of the Hampton model.

The Hampton model of industrial education was intended to "de-politicize" and "defuse" black challenges to white opposition to universal education. Providing, Anderson asserted, "the equivalent … of a fair tenth grade" education, the Hampton model preached an education gospel that emphasized that black people be apolitical (p. 35). Armstrong believed that African Americans should not be "allowed to vote," serve as politicians, or participate in public policy decisions because black people were "not capable of self-government" (p. 37). Armstrong based his assertions on the supposition that black people needed "moral development" as the basis for voting intelligently. He rejected the belief embraced by black people that a "literate culture" created a morally responsible voting electorate. Finally, Armstrong believed that African Americans' real role was to serve the planters' and merchants' needs for cheap non-confrontational labor.

Armstrong created the Southern Workman, a monthly magazine founded in 1872 to create a "public forum" on black education and to more broadly disseminate his views on the "place" of black people in the New South's social, political, and economic structure. He aligned his vision of black education with the planter and merchant class and northern industrialists. Armstrong was a friend of Robert C. Ogden, who also served as a Hampton Institute trustee. He wrote Ogden that the southern workman needed to be "a power" who would influence northern philanthropists and white southern racial moderates principally opposed, Anderson contended, "to black higher education, equal job opportunities, civil equality, and equal political rights" (pp. 36 - 37). Together they hoped to be the critical individuals in determining the direction of black education, especially in the south.

Planter-Merchant and Northern Industrialist Agenda

In 1896, a year after Booker T. Washington's infamous "Atlanta Compromise" speech (partly crafted by industrialist William H. Baldwin Jr.) at the Atlanta Cotton States International Exposition, a conference on "the higher education of the colored people" was convened in Saratoga, New York. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis characterized the meeting as a "watershed conclave" where national white leaders decided to forsake and cut off their support for "black higher education" in favor of the Hampton model of industrial education. George Foster Peabody, Hampton trustee and a key distributor of funding to black education in the south, attended the meeting, and alumnus Washington spoke favoring practical education superceding liberal arts instruction. Philadelphia's Baptist leader H. L. Wayland was enthused to hear Washington's industrial education vision was being substituted for Atlanta and Fisk Universities' New England classical education for black people. Wayland also threatened to terminate funding support to these black liberal arts institutions and shift financial aid to the exponents of the Hampton model, Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. According to David L. Lewis, William Baldwin Jr. and Robert C. Ogden were determined to let nothing impede "the regional reconciliation [of the north and south] and southern modernization that their kind of educational philosophy and capital investment was intended to foster." With Samuel Armstrong's death three years before this conclave, Washington inherited Armstrong's mantle and the people who had supported his mentor. Washington after 1895 was the instrument of the industrialists and planters to restore the Union, modernize the South, and control black mass education.

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was defined by a debate between former slaves establishing a vision and the utility of universal, state-supported public education for all U.S. citizens, especially in the South, and the white planters-merchants and northern industrialists coalition to create a cheap labor force. Black people hoped to utilize education as the means to acquire full citizenship and the key to political participation and economic success. The north-south white elite coalition used education to control blacks politically, economically, and socially, while reconciling the sectional divisions of the Civil War. Washington was at the center of this debate. He represented the white elite and some emerging black middle-class members' thoughts on African-American education for the masses. Political reality in the 1890s and afterward caused Washington to publicly accept white violations of the Fourteenth Amendment that included denying black people the right to vote across the south. Privately, Washington paid lawyers to challenge disfranchisement in the American court system, but even the Supreme Court of the United States endorsed preventing black voting as "an appropriate reform" to remove corruption from politics.

Washington's Legacy

In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the debate about Booker T. Washington's educational legacy has been transformed into a contest between "liberal" thinking African Americans and conservative black intellectuals seeking a viable route to economic success in technology-based America. Specifically, Washington has wrongly become the proponent of a classical education that opened black students' minds to a broader world culture that included the exploration of Latin and the classics. Advocates of this position assert that Washington had a plan for black education that could have ensured African American access to economic success and perhaps middle-class status.

A look back to the Booker T. Washington of the past disregards his criticism of "Latin and Greek" for the newly freed ex-slave as making "a very superior human being … something bordering almost on the super natural" (Washington 1965, p. 65). Washington suggested in Up from Slavery that "the craze for Greek and Latin learning" was wrongly tied by blacks to "a desire to hold [political] office." He did stress that black people should embrace "manual labor" first and then build to the next levels of human achievement over time. He publicly charged that black working people were not ready for all the avenues of freedom. They would have to work toward attaining these privileges over an unspecified amount of time. This was the public rationale of African Americans for forsaking the right to vote in exchange for access to economic success, which would be supervised by white northern and southern capitalists. The white elite, Washington argued publicly, would see to it that black political rights were protected when black people proved their economic importance to white leaders.

For Washington, Samuel Chapman Armstrong was "the perfect man." Washington was "convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women…. Instead of studying books … how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things (1965, p. 49). Washington wanted African Americans to have access to America's material wealth. That objective is still the subject of education reform in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Anderson, James D. 1988. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 - 1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Harlan, Louis H. 1972. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856 - 1901. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harlan, Louis H. 1983. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901 - 1915. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David Levering. 1993. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868 - 1919. New York: Holt.

Washington, Booker T. 1965. Up from Slavery. New York: Dell

Washington, Booker T. 1972 - 1989. Booker T. Washington Papers, Vols. 1 - 14, ed. Louis H. Harlan, et al. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Woodward, C. Vann. 1971. Origins of the New South, 1877 - 1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

— GREGORY MIXON

An African-American educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who headed Tuskegee Institute, a college for African-Americans in Alabama. Washington urged African-Americans to concentrate on economic gains rather than on the pursuit of social and political equality with whites. The best known of his many books is Up from Slavery.

Quotes:

"I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high water mark of pure and useful living."

"Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way."

"I will not permit any man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."

"There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life."

"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

"We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers."

See more famous quotes by Booker T. Washington

Biography

Booker T. Washington
Born	April 5, 1856(1856-04-05) Hale's Ford, Virginia, U.S.
Died	November 14, 1915 (aged 59) Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.
Occupation	Educator, Author, and African American Civil Rights Leader

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Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an African American educator, orator, author and a dominant leader of the nation's African-American community from the 1890s to his death. Born into slavery "near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's Ford" in Franklin County, Virginia^[1] and freed by the Civil War in 1865, he became the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, then a normal teachers' college for blacks. Washington firmly believed in the Hampton system of industrial education: teaching trades like brick-making alongside book learning. Tuskegee was to become his area of operations and he literally helped build it from the ground up.^[2]

As a young man, he invented the surname Washington when all the other school children were giving their full names.^[3]

His "Atlanta Exposition" speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote. White leaders across the North, from politicians to industrialists, from philanthropists to churchmen, enthusiastically supported Washington, as did most middle class blacks. Meanwhile a more militant northern group, led by W. E. B. Du Bois rejected Washington's self-help philosophy and demanded recourse to politics, referring to the speech dismissively as "The Atlanta Compromise". The critics were marginalized until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, at which point more radical black leaders rejected Washington's philosophy and demanded federal civil rights laws.

Contents 1 Career overview 2 Youth, freedom and education 3 Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute 4 Marriages and children 5 Politics and the Atlanta Compromise 6 Wealthy friends and benefactors 6.1 Henry Rogers 6.2 Anna T. Jeanes 6.3 Julius Rosenwald 7 Up from Slavery, and an invitation to the White House 8 Lifetime of overwork, death at age 59 9 Honors and Memorials 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 12.1 Primary sources 12.2 Secondary sources 13 External links

Career overview

Washington was born into slavery to Jane, an enslaved African American woman on the Burroughs Plantation in southwest Virginia. He knew little about his white father. His family gained freedom in 1865 as the Civil War ended. After working in salt furnaces and coal mines in West Virginia for several years, Washington made his way east to Hampton Institute, established to educate freedmen. There, he worked his way through his studies and later attended Wayland Seminary to complete preparation as an instructor. In 1881, Hampton president Samuel C. Armstrong recommended Washington to become the first leader of Tuskegee Institute, the new normal school (teachers' college) in Alabama. He headed what became Tuskegee University for the rest of his life.

Washington was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915, especially after he achieved prominence for his "Atlanta Address of 1895". To many politicians and the public in general, he was seen as a popular spokesman for African-American citizens. Representing the last generation of black leaders born into slavery, Washington was generally perceived as a credible proponent of education for freedmen in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South. Throughout the final 20 years of his life, he maintained his standing through a nationwide network of supporters, including black educators, ministers, editors, and businessmen, especially those who were liberal-leaning on social and educational issues. Critics called his network of supporters the "Tuskegee Machine". He gained access to top national leaders in politics, philanthropy and education, and was awarded honorary degrees from leading American universities.

Late in his career, Washington was criticized by leaders of the NAACP, which was formed in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois suggested activism to achieve civil rights. He labeled Washington "the Great Accommodator". Washington's response was that confrontation could lead to disaster for the outnumbered blacks. He believed that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way in the long run to overcome racism.

Washington contributed secretly and substantially to legal challenges of segregation and disfranchisement of blacks.^[4] In his public role, he believed he could achieve more by skillful accommodation to the social realities of the age of segregation.^[5]

Washington's work on education issues helped him enlist both the moral and substantial financial support of many major white philanthropists. He became friends with such self-made men as Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers; Sears, Roebuck and Company President Julius Rosenwald; and George Eastman, inventor and founder of Kodak. These individuals and many other wealthy men and women funded his causes, including Hampton and Tuskegee institutes.

The schools were founded to produce teachers. However, graduates had often gone back to their local communities only to find precious few schools and educational resources to work with in the largely impoverished South. To address those needs, Washington enlisted his philanthropic network in matching funds programs to stimulate construction of numerous rural public schools for black children in the South. Together, these efforts eventually established and operated over 5,000 schools and supporting resources for the betterment of blacks throughout the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The local schools were a source of communal pride and were priceless to African-American families when poverty and segregation limited severely the life chances of the pupils. A major part of Washington's legacy, the number of model rural schools increased with matching funds from the Rosenwald Fund into the 1930s.^[6]

His autobiography, Up From Slavery, first published in 1901, is still widely read today.

Youth, freedom and education

Booker T. Washington was born on April 5, 1856, on the Burrough's farm at the community of Hale's Ford, Virginia about 25 miles from Roanoke. His mother Jane was an enslaved black woman who worked as a cook and his father was an unknown white plantation owner. Jane was the slave of James Burroughs, a small farmer in Virginia.^[7]

Washington recalled Emancipation in early 1865: [Up from Slavery 19-21]

As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom.... Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper -- the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.

In the summer of 1865, when he was nine, he migrated with his brother John and his sister Amanda to Malden in Kanawha County, West Virginia to join his stepfather, Washington Ferguson. Washington's mother was a major influence on his schooling. Even though she couldn't read herself, she bought her son spelling books which encouraged him to read. She then enrolled him in an elementary school, where Booker took the last name of Washington because he found out that other children had more than one name. When the teacher called on him and asked for his name he answered, "'Booker Washington,' as if I had been called by that name all my life;..." He worked with his mother and other free blacks as a salt-packer and in a coal mine. He even signed up briefly as a hired hand on a steamboat. About the only other jobs available for blacks at the time were in agriculture. He was hired as a houseboy for Viola Ruffner (née Knapp), the wife of General Lewis Ruffner, who owned the salt-furnace and coal mine. Many other houseboys had failed to satisfy the demanding Mrs. Ruffner, but Booker's diligence met her standards. Encouraged by Mrs. Ruffner, young Booker attended school and learned to read and to write. Soon he sought more education than was available in his community.^[8]

Leaving Malden at sixteen, Washington enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in Hampton, Virginia. Students with little income such as Washington could work at the school to pay their way. The normal school at Hampton was founded to train teachers, as education was seen as a critical need by the black community. Funding came from the federal government and white Protestant groups. From 1878 to 1879 Washington attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to teach at Hampton. The president of Hampton, Samuel C. Armstrong recommended Washington to become the first principal at Tuskegee Institute, a similar school being founded in Alabama.^[8]

Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute

Booker T. Washington's house at Tuskegee University

The organizers of the new all-black Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute found the energetic leader they sought in 25 year-old Booker T. Washington. Washington believed with a little self help, people may go from poverty to success. The new school opened on July 4, 1881, initially using space in a local church. The next year, Washington purchased a former plantation, which became the permanent site of the campus. Under his direction, his students literally built their own school: constructing classrooms, barns and outbuildings; growing their own crops and raising livestock, and providing for most of their own basic necessities.^[9] Both men and women had to learn trades as well as academics. Washington helped raise funds to establish and operate hundreds of small community schools and institutions of higher educations for blacks.^[10] The Tuskegee faculty utilized each of these activities to teach the students basic skills to take back to the mostly rural black communities throughout the South. The main goal was not to produce farmers and tradesmen, but teachers of farming and trades who taught in the new high schools and colleges for blacks across the South. The school later grew to become the present-day Tuskegee University.^[11]

The institute illustrated Washington's aspirations for his race. His theory was that by providing needed skills to society, African Americans would play their part, leading to acceptance by white Americans. He believed that blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens. Shortly after the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley and most of his cabinet visited Washington. He led the school until his death in 1915. By then Tuskegee's endowment had grown to over $1.5 million, compared to the initial $2,000 annual appropriation.^[12]

Marriages and children

Booker T. Washington with his third wife Margaret and two sons.

Washington was married three times. In his autobiography Up From Slavery, he gave all three of his wives credit for their contributions at Tuskegee.

Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia, the same Kanawha River Valley town where Washington had lived from age nine to sixteen. He maintained ties there all his life. Washington and Smith were married in the summer of 1882. They had one child, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in May 1884.^[8].

Washington next wed Olivia A. Davidson in 1885. Davidson was born in Ohio and studied at Hampton Institute and the Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham. She taught in Mississippi and Tennessee before going to Tuskegee to work. Washington met Davidson when she was a teacher at Tuskegee. She became the assistant principal there. They had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr. and Ernest Davidson Washington, before she died in 1889.

Washington's third marriage was in 1893 to Margaret James Murray. She was from Mississippi and was a graduate of Fisk University, also a historically black college. They had no children together, but she helped rear Washington's children. Murray outlived Washington and died in 1925.

Politics and the Atlanta Compromise

	"The Atlanta Compromise" The opening of Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition
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Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Exhibition address was viewed as a “revolutionary moment”^[13] by both African-Americans and whites across the country. He was supported by W. E. B. Du Bois at the time but years later the two had a falling out due to difference in direction over the remedy required to reverse disenfranchisement. After the falling out, Du Bois and his supporters took to referring to the Atlanta Exposition speech as the "Atlanta Compromise" speech to illustrate their belief that Washington was too accommodating to white interests.

Washington advocated “go slow” accommodationism.^[13] This required African-Americans to accept the sacrifice of political power, civil rights, and higher education for the youth that existed in the current system. ^[14] His belief was that African-Americans should “concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.” ^[15] Washington valued the "industrial" education, as it provided critical skills for the jobs then available to the majority of African-Americans at the time. It would be these skills that would lay the foundation for the creation of stability that the African-American community required in order to move forward. He believed that in the long term “blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens.” His approach advocated for an initial step towards equal rights, rather than full equality under the law. It would be this step that would provide the economic power to back up their demands for equality in the future. ^[16] This action, over time, would provide the proof to a deeply prejudiced white America that they were not in fact “’naturally’ stupid and incompetent.” ^[17]

This stance was contrary to what many blacks from the North envisioned. Du Bois wanted blacks to have the same "classical" liberal arts education as whites did, along with voting rights and civic equality. He believed that an elite he called the Talented Tenth would advance to lead the race to a wider variety of occupations.^[18] The source of division between Du Bois and Washington was generated by the differences in how African-Americans were treated in the North versus the South. Many in the North felt that they were being “'led', and authoritatively spoken for, by a Southern accommodationist imposed on them primarily by Southern whites.”^[19] Both men sought to define the best means to improve the conditions of the post-Civil War African-American community through education.

Blacks were solidly Republican in this period. Southern states disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites from 1890-1908 through constitutional amendments and statutes that created barriers to voter registration and voting such as poll taxes and literacy tests. More blacks continued to vote in border and northern states.

Washington worked and socialized with many white politicians and industry leaders. Much of his expertise was his ability to persuade wealthy whites to donate money to black causes. He argued that the surest way for blacks eventually to gain equal social rights was to demonstrate “patience, industry, thrift, and usefulness.” ^[20] This was the key to improved conditions for African Americans in the United States. Because they had only recently been granted emancipation, he believed they could not expect too much at once. Washington said, "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed. ^[8]

Along with W. E. B. Du Bois, he partly organized the "Negro exhibition" at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where photos, taken by his friend Frances Benjamin Johnston, of Hampton Institute's black students were displayed.^[21] The exhibition aimed at showing Afro-Americans' positive contributions to American society. ^[21]

While not publicly confrontational, Washington privately contributed substantial funds for legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, such as the case of Giles v. Harris, which went before the United States Supreme Court in 1903.^[22]

Wealthy friends and benefactors

Washington's wealthy friends included Andrew Carnegie and Robert C. Ogden, seen here in 1906 while visiting Tuskegee Institute

Washington associated with the richest and most powerful businessmen and politicians of the era. He was seen as a spokesperson for African Americans and became a conduit for funding educational programs. His contacts included such diverse and well-known personages as Andrew Carnegie, William Howard Taft, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Huttleston Rogers, Julius Rosenwald, Robert Ogden, Collis P. Huntington, and William Baldwin, who donated large sums of money to agencies such as the Jeanes and Slater Funds. As a result, countless small schools were established through his efforts, in programs that continued many years after his death. Along with rich people, black communities also helped their communities by donating time, money and labor to schools. Churches such as the Baptist and Methodist also supported black schools in both the elementary and secondary levels.

Henry Rogers

A representative case of an exceptional relationship was Washington's friendship with millionaire industrialist and financier Henry H. Rogers (1840-1909). Henry Rogers was a self-made man, who had risen from a modest working-class family to become a principal of Standard Oil, and had become one of the richest men in the United States. Around 1894, Rogers heard Washington speak at Madison Square Garden. The next day, he contacted Washington and requested a meeting, during which Washington later recounted that he was told that Rogers "was surprised that no one had 'passed the hat' after the speech." The meeting began a close relationship that was to extend over a period of 15 years. Although he and the very-private Rogers openly became visible to the public as friends, and Washington was a frequent guest at Rogers' New York office, his Fairhaven, Massachusetts summer home, and aboard his steam yacht Kanawha, the true depth and scope of their relationship was not publicly revealed until after Rogers' sudden death of an apoplectic stroke in May 1909.

Handbill from 1909 tour of southern Virginia and West Virginia.

A few weeks later, Washington went on a previously planned speaking tour along the newly completed Virginian Railway, a $40 million dollar enterprise which had been built almost entirely from a substantial portion of Rogers' personal fortune. As Washington rode in the late financier's private railroad car, "Dixie", he stopped and made speeches at many locations, where his companions later recounted that he had been warmly welcomed by both black and white citizens at each stop.

Washington revealed that Rogers had been quietly funding operations of 65 small country schools for African Americans, and had given substantial sums of money to support Tuskegee Institute and Hampton Institute. He also disclosed that Rogers had encouraged programs with matching funds requirements so the recipients would have a stake in knowing that they were helping themselves through their own hard work and sacrifice, and thereby enhance their self-esteem.

Anna T. Jeanes

$1,000,000 was entrusted to Washington by Anna T. Jeanes (1822-1907) of Philadelphia in 1907. She hoped to construct some elementary schools for Negro children in the South. Her contributions and those of Henry Rogers and others funded schools in many communities where the white people were also very poor, and few funds were available for Negro schools.

Julius Rosenwald

Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) was another self-made wealthy man with whom Washington found common ground. By 1908, Rosenwald, son of an immigrant clothier, had become part-owner and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago. Rosenwald was a philanthropist who was deeply concerned about the poor state of African American education, especially in the Southern states.

In 1912 Rosenwald was asked to serve on the Board of Directors of Tuskegee Institute, a position he held for the remainder of his life. Rosenwald endowed Tuskegee so that Washington could spend less time traveling to seek funding and devote more time towards management of the school. Later in 1912, Rosenwald provided funds for a pilot program involving six new small schools in rural Alabama, which were designed, constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914 and overseen by Tuskegee; the model proved successful. Rosenwald established the The Rosenwald Fund. The school building program was one of its largest programs. Using state-of-the-art architectural plans initially drawn by professors at Tuskegee Institute, the Rosenwald Fund spent over four million dollars to help build 4,977 schools, 217 teachers' homes, and 163 shop buildings in 883 counties in 15 states, from Maryland to Texas.^[23] The Rosenwald Fund used a system of matching grants, and black communities raised more than $4.7 million to aid the construction.^[24] These schools became known as Rosenwald Schools. By 1932, the facilities could accommodate one third of all African American children in Southern U.S. schools.

Up from Slavery, and an invitation to the White House

Washington authored four books during his lifetime:

• The Story of My Life and Work (1900)
• Up From Slavery (1901)
• My Larger Education (1911)
• The Man Farthest Down (1912)

In an effort to inspire the "commercial, agricultural, educational, and industrial advancement" of African Americans, Washington founded the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in 1900.^[25]

When Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, was published in 1901, it became a bestseller and had a major impact on the African American community, and its friends and allies. A dinner invitation in 1901 by Theodore Roosevelt made Washington the first African-American to visit the White House as a guest of the president.

James K. Vardaman, soon to be Governor of Mississippi, and Benjamin Tillman, US Senator for South Carolina, indulged in their habitual racist personal attacks in response to the invitation. Verdaman described the White House as "so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable",^[26][27] and declared "I am just as much opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the cocoanut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship."^[28] Tillman opined that "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."^[29]

Austro-Hungarian Ambassador Ladislaus Hengelmüller von Hengervár, visiting the White House on the same day, claimed to have found a rabbit's foot in Washington's coat pocket when he mistakenly put on the coat; The Washington Post elaborately described it as "the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon".^[30] The Detroit Journal quipped the next day, "The Austrian ambassador may have made off with Booker T. Washington's coat at the White House, but he'd have a bad time trying to fill his shoes."^[30][31]

Lifetime of overwork, death at age 59

Booker T. Washington's coffin being carried to grave site.

Despite his travels and widespread work, Washington remained as principal of Tuskegee. Washington's health was deteriorating rapidly; he collapsed in New York City and was brought home to Tuskegee, where he died on November 14, 1915 at the age of 59. The cause of death was unclear, probably from nervous exhaustion and arteriosclerosis.^[32] He was buried on the campus of Tuskegee University near the University Chapel.

His death was thought at the time to have been a result of congestive heart failure, aggravated by overwork. In March 2006, with the permission of his descendants, examination of medical records indicated that he died of hypertension, with a blood pressure more than twice normal, confirming what had long been suspected.

At his death Tuskegee's endowment exceeded US$1.5 million. His greatest life's work, the work of education of blacks in the South, was well underway and expanding.

Honors and Memorials

For his contributions to American society, Washington was granted an honorary master's degree from Harvard University in 1896 and an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College in 1901.

Washington, as the guest of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, was the first African-American ever invited to the White House. At the end of the 2008 presidential election, the defeated Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, referred to Washington’s visit to the White House a century before as the seed that blossomed into the first African American becoming the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

In 1934, Robert Russa Moton, Washington's successor as president of Tuskegee University, arranged an air tour for two African Americans aviators, and afterward the plane was christened the Booker T. Washington.

In 1942, the Liberty Ship Booker T. Washington was named in his honor, the first major oceangoing vessel to be named after an African American. The ship was christened by Marian Anderson.^[33]

1940 US postage stamp

On April 7, 1940, Washington became the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp. The first coin to feature an African American was the Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar that was minted by the United States from 1946 to 1951. He was also depicted on a U.S. Half Dollar from 1951-1954.^[34]

On April 5, 1956, the hundredth anniversary of Washington's birth, the house where he was born in Franklin County, Virginia, was designated as the Booker T. Washington National Monument. A state park in Chattanooga, Tennessee was named in his honor, as was a bridge spanning the Hampton River adjacent to his alma mater, Hampton University.

In 1984, Hampton University dedicated a Booker T. Washington Memorial on campus near the historic Emancipation Oak, establishing, in the words of the University, "a relationship between one of America's great educators and social activists, and the symbol of Black achievement in education."^[35]

Numerous high schools, middle schools and elementary schools^[36] across the United States have been named after Booker T. Washington.

At the center of the campus at Tuskegee University, the Booker T. Washington Monument, called "Lifting the Veil," was dedicated in 1922. The inscription at its base reads:

"He lifted the veil of ignorance from his people and pointed the way to progress through education and industry."

See also

• African American literature
• List of African American firsts
• Booker T. Washington High School
• Boley, Oklahoma
• Double-duty dollar

Notes

1. ^ Washington 1901, p. 1.
2. ^ Washington 1901.
3. ^ Washington 1901, p. 34.
4. ^ Meier 1957
5. ^ Harlan (1983) p. 359
6. ^ Anderson (1998)
7. ^ www.online-literature.com/booker-washington
8. ^ ^{a b c d} Harlan (1972)
9. ^ African American Odyssey: "The Booker T. Washington Era (Part 1)", Library of Congress, 21 Mar 2008, accessed 3 Sep 2008
10. ^ E.l. Thorn Brough, Booker T. Washington, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs New Jersey.
11. ^ name="Harlan 1972"
12. ^ Harlan (1972); Harlan (1983)
13. ^ ^{a b} Bauerlien p 106 (2004)
14. ^ Pole p 888 (1974)
15. ^ Du Bois p 41-59 (1903)
16. ^ Pole p 107(1974)
17. ^ Crouch p 96(2005)
18. ^ Du Bois p 189 (1903)
19. ^ Pole p 980 (1974)
20. ^ Washington p 68 (1972)
21. ^ ^{a b} Anne Maxell, "Montrer l'Autre: Franz Boas et les soeurs Gerhard", in Zoos humains. De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, edition La Découverte (2002), p.331-339, in part. p.338
22. ^ Harlan (1971)
23. ^ See [1],
24. ^ See
25. ^ See
26. ^ Wickham, DeWayne (February 14, 2002). "Book fails to strip meaning of 'N' word". USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/wickham/2002-02-15-wickham.htm. 
27. ^ Nathan Miller. Harper Collins. http://books.google.com/books?id=2maGdg-nHCIC&pg=PA362&dq=Vardaman+rats+refuge#v=onepage&q=Vardaman%20rats%20refuge&f=false title= Theodore Roosevelt: A Life. 
28. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=VgMRHB3dvNIC&pg=PA71&dq=Rubio+coon#v=onepage&q=&f=false
29. ^ Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Pantheon. ISBN 0-375-42172-6. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/nigger.htm. 
30. ^ ^{a b} "Booker T. Washington Papers". http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.8/html/437.html. 
31. ^ Detroit Journal, 14th Nov, 1905
32. ^ The question of syphilis is discussed in Harlan 2:451-55
33. ^ Marian Anderson christens the liberty ship Booker T. Washington
34. ^ Commemorative Coin Programs - The United States Mint
35. ^ See
36. ^ See Washington Elementary in Mesa Arizona, http://www2.mpsaz.org/washington/

References

Primary sources

• DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk A. C. McClurg and Co. (1903)
• Washington, Booker T. The Atlanta Cotton States Exposition Address (Sep, 1895).
• Washington, Booker T. The Awakening of the Negro, The Atlantic Monthly, 78 (September, 1896).
•   (1901). Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/washington/washing.html.  Documenting the American South. Other online full-text versions available via Project Gutenberg, UNC Library
•   (December 1906). "A Farmers' College on Wheels". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XIII: 8352-8354. 
•   (October 1910). "Chapters From My Experience I". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XX: 13505-13522. 
•   (November 1910). "Chapters From My Experience II". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 13627-13640. 
•   (December 1910). "Chapters From My Experience III". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 13784-13794. 
•   (January 1911). "Chapters From My Experience IV". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 13847-13854. 
•   (February 1911). "Chapters From My Experience V". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 14032-14039. 
•   (April 1911). "Chapters From My Experience VI". The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 14230-14238. 
• Washington,Booker T. , Louis R Harlan, John W. Blassingame The Booker T. Washington Papers, University of Illinois Press (1972) ISBN 0252002423 Google Book Search. Retrieved on February 4, 2009.
• The Booker T. Washington Papers University of Illinois Press online version of complete fourteen volume set of all letters to and from Booker T. Washington.
  • Cumulative Index

Secondary sources

• Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (1988)
• Bauerlein, Mark. Washington, Du Bois, and the Black Future" in Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 2004).
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later (2003).
• Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (1972) the standard biography, vol 1.
• Harlan, Louis R. 'Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee 1901-1915 (1983), the standard scholarly biography vol 2.
• Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan (1988).
• Harlan, Louis R. "The Secret Life of Booker T. Washington." Journal of Southern History 37:2 (1971). in JSTOR Documents Booker T. Washington's secret financing and directing of litigation against segregation and disfranchisement.
• Mcmurry, Linda O. George Washington Carver, Scientist and Symbol (1982)
• Meier, August. "Toward a Reinterpretation of Booker T. Washington." The Journal of Southern History, 23#2 (May, 1957), pp. 220–227. in JSTOR. Documents Booker T. Washington's secret financing and directing of litigation against segregation and disfranchisement.
• Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (2009). Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. ISBN 067403211X; ISBN 978-0674032118, favorable scholarly biography
• Smock, Raymond. Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009,
• Cary D. Wintz, African American Political Thought, 1890-1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph (1996).
• Pole, J. R. Review: Of mr booker T. Washington and others; the children of pride. vol. II: The Historical Journal 17, (4) (Dec,1974) in JSTOR
• Bauerlein, Mark. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois: The origins of a bitter intellectual battle. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (46) (Winter,2004) in JSTOR
• Crouch,Stanley The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity Basic Civitas Books,ISBN 0465015166 (2005)
• Booker T. Washington's West Virginia Boyhood
• Works by Booker T. Washington at Project Gutenberg
• Booker T. Washington's 1909 Tour of Virginia on the newly completed Virginian Railway
• Dr. Booker T. Washington papers - comments about Henry Rogers
• National Park Service Booker T. Washington Birthplace
• Legends of Tuskegee
• Booker T. Washington's Gravesite

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Booker T. Washington

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Booker T. Washington

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Booker T. Washington

• An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work. Toronto, Ont.; Naperville, Ill.: J. L. Nichols & Co., c1901.
• Frederick Douglass. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906.
• My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1911.
• Booker T. Washington: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
• Up from Slavery: An Autobiography from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• From Slave to College President:Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington at Project Gutenberg
• Booker T. Washington at Project Gutenberg , by Emmett J. Scott
• The Booker T. Washington papers digital archive, University of Illinois Press searchable index to complete annotated text of all important letters to and from Washington and all his writings.
• A Criticism of the Atlanta Compromise by W.E.B. Dubois
• Booker T. Washington Delivers the 1895 Atlanta "Compromise" Speech from the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning (Graduate Center, CUNY) and the Center for History and New Media (George Mason University)
• Booker T. Washington statue at Tuskegee University
• Abbott, Lyman (October 5 1921). "Snap-Shots Of My Contemporaries: Booker T. Washington". The Outlook 129: 181-182. http://books.google.com/books?id=sVroBrOJL64C&pg=PA181. Retrieved 2009-07-30. 

Persondata
NAME	Washington, Booker T.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Washington, Booker Taliaferro
SHORT DESCRIPTION	educator
DATE OF BIRTH	April 5, 1856
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hale's Ford, Franklin County, Virginia, United States of America
DATE OF DEATH	November 15, 1915
PLACE OF DEATH	Tuskegee, Alabama, United States of America

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