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By Root 2119 0

by the mass, wedlock being the rule, and not the exception; if we have a vast volume of illiteracy, we have reduced it by forty per cent. since the war, and the school houses are all full of children eager to learn, and the schools of higher and industrial training cannot accommodate all those who knock at their doors for admission; if we have more than our share of criminality, we have also churches in every hamlet and city, to which a vast majority of the people belong, and which are insistently pointing "the way, the light and the truth" to higher and nobler living.

Mindful, therefore, of the Negro's two hundred and forty-five years of slave education and unrequited toil, and of his thirty years of partial freedom and less than partial opportunity, who shall say that his place in American life at the present day is not all that should be reasonably expected of him, that it is not creditable to him, and that it is not a sufficient augury for better and nobler and higher thinking, striving and building in the future? Social growth is the slowest of all growth. If there be signs of growth, then, there is reasonable hope for a healthy maturity. There are plenty of such signs, and he who runs may read them, if he will.

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Booker T. Washington

Summary | Career overview | Youth, freedom and education | Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute | Marriages and children | Politics and the Atlanta Compromise | Wealthy friends and benefactors | Henry Rogers | Anna T. Jeanes | Julius Rosenwald | Up from Slavery an invitation to the White House | Lifetime of overwork, death at age 59 | Honors and Memorials

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

Summary

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, orator, author and the dominant leader of the African-American community nationwide from the 1890s to his death. Born to slavery and freed by the Civil War in 1865, as a young man, became head of the new Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. It became his base of operations. 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 endorsed Washington's program, as did most middle class blacks across the country. A more militant northern group, led by W.E.B. DuBois rejected Washington's self-help and demanded recourse to politics, referring to the speech submissively 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.

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