Booker T Washington

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, Booker Taliaferro Washington, was the foremost black educator of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also had a major influence on the southern race relations and was the dominant figure in black public affairs from 1895 until his death in 1915. Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia back country, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. After a secondary education at Hampton Institute, he taught an upgraded school and experimented briefly with the study of law and the ministry, but a teaching position at Hampton decided his future career.

In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. Though Washington offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both northern philanthropic foundations and southern leaders were already promoting, he became its chief black exemplar and spokesman. In his advocacy of Tuskegee Institute and its educational method, Washington revealed the political proficiency and accommodational philosophy that were to characterize his career in the wider arena of race leadership. He convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that would keep blacks down on the farm and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and particularly the new self- made millionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie he promised the instilment of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living within the limited distances of the post- Reconstruction South, Washington held out industrial education as the means of escape form the web of sharecropping and debt and the achievement of attainable, self-employment, landownership, and small businesses.

Washington acquired local white approval and secured a small state accumulation, but it was northern donations that made Tuskegee Institute by, 1900, the best-supported black educational institution in the country. The Atlanta Compromise Address, delivered before the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, enlarged Washington's influence into the arena of race relations and black leadership. Washington offered black consent in disfranchisement and social segregation if whites would encourage black progress in economic and educational opportunity. Hailed as a sage by whites of both sections, Washington further consolidated his influence by his widely read autobiography Up From