Black History Month

Spotlight on: Booker T. Washington

Writer, black leader, educator: Born Booker Taliaferro Washington on April 5, 1856 in Franklin County, Virginia. The son of a white slave owner and a black slave, Washington was freed after emancipation (1865) and worked as a houseboy where he learned to read and write. He studied to be a teacher at Hampton Institute, Virginia, and eventually became a writer and speaker on black issues and struggles. In 1881, Washington was appointed principal of the newly opened Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, and built it up into a major center of black education. By cooperating with white people and enlisting the support of wealthy philanthropists, he helped raise funds to establish and operate hundreds of small community schools and institutions of higher education for blacks. Though he was strongly criticized by W. E. B. Du Bois and his policies were repudiated by the civil rights movement, Washington remains the foremost black leader of the late 1800s. He received national prominence for his Atlanta Address of 1895 and won white support through his acceptance of the separation of blacks and whites. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, first published in 1901, is still widely read.


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