Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
In Up from Slavery, Washington recounts the story of his life-from slave to educator. The early sections deal with his upbringing as a slave and his efforts to get an education. Washington details his transition from student to teacher, and outlines his own development as an educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In the final chapters of Up From Slavery, Washington describes his career as a public speaker and civil rights activist.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
In Up from Slavery, Washington recounts the story of his life-from slave to educator. The early sections deal with his upbringing as a slave and his efforts to get an education. Washington details his transition from student to teacher, and outlines his own development as an educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In the final chapters of Up From Slavery, Washington describes his career as a public speaker and civil rights activist.
Booker Taliaferro Washington, the educator and racial spokesman who
remains one of the most controversial figures in African-American
history, was born into slavery on a tobacco farm in Franklin
County, Virginia, on April 5, 1856. His mother was the plantation's
cook; his father was an unknown white man. At the close of the
Civil War, Washington moved with his mother and stepfather to the
river town of Malden, West Virginia, where he toiled in coal mines
and salt furnaces, securing a basic education in his spare time.
Later he worked as a houseboy for Mrs. Viola Ruffner, a New England
woman who recognized his eagerness to advance himself. In 1872
Washington returned to Virginia to enroll in the Hampton Normal and
Agricultural Institute, a vocational school for blacks founded by
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a former Union general. Washington
graduated with honors in 1875. Afterward, he taught school in
Malden and briefly attended the Wayland Seminary in Washington,
D.C., before accepting an invitation from General Armstrong to join
the faculty at Hampton.
In 1881 Washington left Virginia for Alabama, to establish the
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. The school opened on July
4, 1881, with one teacher and thirty pupils. Through skillful
management, tireless fund-raising, and shrewd diplomacy with
whites, he built Tuskegee, literally brick by brick, into the top
black trade school in the country. Like his mentor, General
Armstrong, Washington made sure that all skills and academic
courses taught at Tuskegee had practical application in the economy
of the postwar South. A pragmatist, not an idealist, he endorsed
the Puritan virtue of self-help, maintaining, "the individual who
can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make
his way regardless of his race."
Washington's well-known success as an educator led to his being
asked to speak on racial issues. In 1895 he delivered opening
remarks at the Cotton States and International Exposition in
Atlanta. In the now-famous Atlanta Compromise Address, Washington
urged blacks to postpone their demands for equal rights and focus
instead on improving themselves through education, industriousness,
and racial solidarity. "In all things that are purely social we can
be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress," he stated. The following year
Washington became the first black to receive an honorary Master of
Arts degree from Harvard University.
By 1900 Washington, the so-called "Wizard of Tuskegee," had emerged
as America's most influential black leader. He launched the
National Negro Business League in Boston and, in rapid succession,
published two volumes of autobiography- The Story of My Life and
Work (1900) and Up from Slavery (1901). William Dean Howells
praised Up from Slavery in the North American Review, and Langston
Hughes later deemed it "one of America's most revealing books."
Washington created a storm of controversy, however, when he dined
at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss
political appointments in the South.
In 1903 Washington's accommodationist position came under attack by
W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois wrote- "His
doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the
burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand
aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact
the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are
clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs."
Soon Washington's leadership was challenged by the militant Niagara
Movement, founded in 1905, and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, which succeeded it in 1910.
Washington maintained a grueling work schedule during his final
years. He also toured Europe and brought out two last books, My
Larger Education (1911) and The Man Farthest Down (1912). In
November 1915, while visiting New York City on business, Washington
was hospitalized. Realizing the gravity of his condition, he
insisted on returning home. "I was born in the South, have lived
all my life in the South, and expect to die and be buried in the
South," he often said. Booker T. Washington arrived in Alabama by
train only hours before his death on November 14, 1915. He was
buried two days later in the small cemetery on the campus of the
Tuskegee Institute.
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