Educator, author, speaker, and advisor to presidents of the United States, Booker T. Washington was the leading voice of former slaves and their descendants during the late 1800s. Booker Taliaferro Washington was born April 5, 1856, on a small tobacco plantation in the back country of Franklin County, Va. The 207-acre plantation on which Booker was born and spent his childhood years consisted of a plain log house, a few head of livestock, and about 10 slaves, which was typical of the region. His father was an unknown White man and his mother, Jane, the slave of James Burroughs, a small farmer in Virginia. Washington later described his childhood memories of their cabin, remembering how it only had openings – rather than glass windows – and how he slept on rags. Later, his mother married the slave, Washington Ferguson. James Burroughs enslaved Washington for the first nine years of his life.
The Burroughs family enjoyed few comforts, and for their slaves, life was a bare existence indeed. For Booker, the worst aspect of slavery was its suppression of a child's natural desire to learn. Teaching a slave to read and write was prohibited by law in Virginia, as it was throughout most of the South. The Civil War years were a time of hardship for the Burroughs family. This changed in 1865 when one day a stranger arrived on the plantation and read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, which had formally gone into effect years before. Unlike most slaves, Booker and his family were fortunate in having a place to go when their freedom was proclaimed. During the war, Booker's stepfather had escaped to Malden, West Virginia, where he obtained work in a salt furnace. After the war, Jane move the family to Malden, to join her husband. Nine-year old Booker found employment as a salt-packer. A few years later, he labored as a coal miner.
The nearby Kanawha Sapines salt furnaces provided wage work for many freed slaves in West Virginia, including members of Washington's family. Bitter disappointment came when a school for Negroes opened in Malden and Booker's stepfather would not let him leave work to attend. But Booker arranged with the teacher to give him lessons at night. Later he was allowed to go to school during the day and work in the furnace till nine o'clock. When Booker entered school he took the name of his stepfather Washington as his surname. He would add the "Taliaferro" later when he learned that it was part of the name given to him by his mother shortly after his birth, and became known as Booker T. Washington. Washington chose to pursue his dream of obtaining an education.
In 1866, a prominent White family, the Ruffners, hired the young Washington as a domestic. The wife of Lewis Ruffner, the owner of the mines encouraged Booker to continue his education. Young Booker first went to school, not as a student, but to carry his young mistress' books to class. Later he attended night school while working in the salt furnace. Washington thought that getting an education was "about the same as getting into paradise". While working in the coal mine, Washington overheard two miners talking about a "large school for Negroes at Hampton, Va." In the autumn of 1872, sixteen years old Booker, without money or a map, travelled by foot 400 miles to Hampton, to enroll in “Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute”. Washington studied at Hampton Institute for 3 years, working as a janitor to earn his board and to pay his expenses as a student. His experience there influenced him profoundly.
The principal of the institute was Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, an opponent of slavery who had been commander of Black troops during the Civil War. Then general believed that it was important that the freed slaves received a practical education. Armstrong was impressed with Washington and arranged for his tuition to be paid for by a wealthy White man. Armstrong's views of the development of character and morality and the importance of providing African Americans with a practical education had a lasting impact on Washington's own philosophy. After graduating from the Hampton Agricultural Institute in 1875, at the age of 19, Washington returned to Malden and found work with a local school. After a spell as a student at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., he returned to Hampton in 1879, at General Armstrong's request to teach in a program for Native Americans. Armstrong was highly impressed with Washington.
In 1880, Lewis Adams, a Black political leader in Macon County, AL., agreed to help two White Democratic Party candidates, William Foster and Arthur Brooks, to win a local election in return for the building of a Negro school in the area. Both men were elected and they then used their influence to secure approval for the building of the Tuskegee Institute. The purpose of the school would be to train elementary school teachers. The two men wrote to General Armstrong asking him to recommend a man to start a Negro normal school there. On May 27th 1881, the Hampton Institute president Samuel C. Armstrong recommended Washington, then age 25, to become the first leader of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Not knowing of Washington, the two men expected a White man for the job.
When he arrived on June 24th, he discovered the school hadn’t been built or even financed. The school began with just a few dozen students and no buildings of its own. Tuskegee Negro Normal Institute opened on the 4th July, 1888. The school was originally a shanty building owned by the local church. The school only received funding of $2,000 a year and this was only enough to pay the staff. Eventually Washington was able to borrow money from the treasurer of the Hampton Agricultural Institute to purchase an abandoned plantation on the outskirts of Tuskegee and built his own school. Washington worked tirelessly to craft Tuskegee as a premiere institution. Under his direction, his students literally built their own school: making bricks, constructing classrooms, barns and outbuildings; and growing their own crops and raising livestock; both for learning and to provide for most of the basic necessities.
As he toured the Alabama countryside surveying the poverty and squalor prevalent among his race, As Washington saw it, trained labor would lead to economic prosperity, and economic prosperity to full citizenship and equal participation in American life. Washington was convinced that economic advancement through vocational training was the essential first step forward for the Black masses. Tuskegee Institute opened with 30 students selected chiefly for their potential as teachers. The school taught academic subjects but emphasized a practical education. Both men and women had to learn trades as well as academics. The Tuskegee faculty used all the activities to teach the students basic skills to take back to their mostly rural Black communities throughout the South. This included farming, carpentry, brickmaking, shoemaking, printing and cabinetmaking. This enabled students to become involved in the building of a new school.
Students worked long-hours, arising at five in the morning and finishing at 9:30 at night. The main goal was not to produce farmers and tradesmen, but teachers of farming and trades who could teach in the new lower schools and colleges for African Americans across the South. As Tuskegee and its facilities grew, its courses in the building trades and engineering subjects were greatly expanded. By 1888 the school owned 540 acres of land and had over 400 students. Washington was able to attract good teachers to his school such as Olivia Davidson, who was appointed assistant principal, and Adella Logan. They raised as much as $3,000 a month. Washington's conservative leadership of the school made it acceptable to the White-controlled Macon County. He believed that Blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by acting as responsible, reliable American citizens. Washington claimed that African Americans needed to prove their loyalty to the United States by working hard without complaint before being granted their political rights.
Washington married Fanny Smith, a student of his who had gone on to graduate from Hampton, on August 2, 1882, she died the following year at age 26, after bearing a daughter. In 1885, he married Olivia Davidson. Olivia’s health, which had been fragile, broke down, and she died four years later. While at Fisk University for a speaking engagement, Washington met a senior named Margaret Murray who had written him about a teaching position at Tuskegee. Impressed, he hired her as an English teacher. Soon she was supervising women’s industries at Tuskegee. He asked her to become "Lady Principal" and was in charge of industries for girls. Eventually they were married in 1893. She assumed more and more responsibility at Tuskegee, giving Washington the time to pursue fund raising and to address political issues. Mrs. Washington worked in the community and accompanied her husband on many of his travels.
During its second decade, Tuskegee acquired a teacher who would become as famous as its founder. The State of Alabama provided for an agricultural experiment station at Tuskegee in 1896 to be run in connection with the school's agricultural department. Dr. George Washington Carver was called from Iowa State College to lead these operations. He went to Tuskegee where he took over the agriculture department. The single-crop system in the South had substantially depleted the soil, so Carver encouraged farmers to restore soil nitrogen by planting soybeans, peanuts and sweet potatoes. Because there was limited demand for these, he conceived hundreds of new uses, which included flour, ink, dyes, plastics, soap, cosmetics, wood stains, cooking oils and medicinal oils. He was also a prolific agricultural scientist and inventor who thrived in the fields of agriculture, agronomy, botany, and chemistry.
Despite his full schedule, he paid great attention to detail, often riding about the campus at daybreak to inspect the facilities and teachers' homes. Any evidence of carelessness—trash lying about, a picket missing from a fence—was bound to provoke a reprimand. Everyone at Tuskegee was affected by Washington's puritannical insistence on personal cleanliness, typified by his "gospel of the toothbrush" which stipulated that no student could remain in the school unless he kept and used a toothbrush. Even in later years the principal himself often inspected the students, sending anyone with a missing button or soiled clothing to the dormitory to correct the deficiency. Washington's demanding manner made him difficult to work for. He drove himself and expected his assistants to keep pace.
Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee program came to have strong appeal for many White Americans sincerely concerned about the economic plight of the Negro. In an age that worshiped individual effort and self-help, this extraordinary former slave working to elevate his race from poverty was hailed by many as the answer to a great national problem. The appeal of Washington's educational philosophy and the force of his dynamic personality eventually won financial support from many of the era's foremost philanthropists. During Washington's lifetime, Tuskegee's more prominent benefactors included Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Julius Rosenwald, Collis P. Huntington, and the Phelps-Stokes family. Carnegie's gifts included a life income for Washington and his family.
On September 18th, 1895, Washington became a national figure when his speech at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta was widely reported by the country's newspapers. He noted that a third of the population in the South was Black, and the South couldn’t prosper unless Black people prospered. He urged Blacks to “Cast down your bucket where you are” and make the most of available opportunities. He encouraged the White man to “Cast down your bucket among these [black] people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, build your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South”.
Essentially, the speech was a bid for White support of Negro economic advancement, offering in exchange—at least for the present—Black acceptance of political inactivity and social segregation. He valued the "industrial" education, as it provided critical skills for the jobs then available to the majority of African Americans at the time, as most lived in the South, which was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Washington believed that once it was apparent to Whites that Blacks would "contribute to the market place of the world," and be content with living "by the production of our hands," the barriers of racial inequality and social injustice would begin to erode. Response to the Atlanta speech—particularly White response—was highly enthusiastic. Washington's conservative views made him popular with White politicians who were keen that he should become the new leader of the African American people
To help him in this President William McKinley visited the Tuskegee Institute and praised Washington's achievements. Overnight, Washington became recognized the leader of African Americans, the successor to Frederick Douglass who had died seven months earlier. However, by this times, other African Americans, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, were becoming national figures and speaking out about the lack of progress African Americans were making in American society. Du Bois, initially an ally of Washington's, was particularly vocal about what he believed was Washington's acceptance of Black's unchanging situation and began to refer to Washington's Atlanta speech as the "Atlanta Compromise" — a label that remains to this day. The criticism by Du Bois and Trotter diminished Washington's stature for some in the Black community, although he was still seen as the leader of his race.
In 1900 Washington helped establish the National Negro Business League, an organization he had founded to help Black commercial enterprises. Washington, who served as president, ensured that the organization concentrated on commercial issues and paid no attention to questions of Black civil rights. Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class Blacks, church leaders, and White philanthropists and politicians, with the goal of building the community's economic strength and pride by focusing on self-help and education. To Washington, the opportunity to earn a living and acquire property was more important than the right to vote. Like those who helped fund the Tuskegee Institute, Washington was highly critical of the emerging trade union movement in the U.S.
Among this hectic schedule, he published his autobiography "Up from Slavery" in 1901, a selective but extremely influential account of his life that attributed his success to his commitment to education. The book was an immediate best seller. In October 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to visit him in the White House. To southern Whites this was going too far. One editor wrote: "With our long-matured views on the subject of social intercourse between Blacks and Whites, the least we can say now is that we deplore the President's taste, and we distrust his wisdom". Although Republican presidents had met privately with Black leaders, this was the first highly publicized social occasion when an African American was invited there on equal terms by the president.
In 1903 W.E.B Du Bois joined the attack on Washington with his essay on his work in "Soul of Black Folks". He believed that "the talented tenth" would lead the race. Du Bois labeled Washington, "the Great Accommodator". Washington retaliated with criticisms of Du Bois and his Niagara Movement. Trotter denied that Washington was a true leader of the race, claiming that he had been elevated to that position by whites alone. He regarded Washington's concentration on manual training for Blacks and his accommodating approach to the loss of civil rights as traitorous and charged that he was being used by Whites to "master the Colored Race". Washington and Du Bois also clashed over the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Washington approved of the NAACP's objectives and much of its work but he feared that its militant tone would alienate many Whites, particular Southern Whites. Its intellectual leaders, he said, did not understand the practical problems of the great majority of Southern Blacks.
Yet there was another side to Washington. While promoting moderation, Washington contributed secretly and substantially to mounting legal challenges activist African Americans launched against segregation and disenfranchisement of Blacks. He secretly financed and encouraged lawsuits to block attempts to disfranchise and segregate Blacks. Although he now had a large number of critics, Washington continued to be consulted by powerful White politicians and had a say in the African American appointments made by Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) and William H. Taft (1909-13). In November 1915, Washington began to take ill. He went to St. Luke’s Hospital in New York and consulted doctors there, but they couldn’t do much. He decided to head home. “I was born in the South,” he remarked, “I have lived and labored in the South, and I expect to die and be buried in the South.” As he made his final journey, he had much to be proud of.
When Washington got home, and entered St. Luke's Hospital, New York City, on 5th November, 1915. He died Sunday morning, November 14, 1915. He was 59. A simple funeral was held Wednesday in the Tuskegee Institute Chapel. Booker T. Washington was so acclaimed as a public leader that the period of his activity, from 1880 to 1915, has been called the Age of Booker T. Washington. After his death, he came under heavy criticism in the civil rights community for accommodationist to White supremacy. However, since the late 20th century, a more balanced view of his very wide range of activities has appeared. Washington was held in high regard by business-oriented conservatives, both White and Black. At a time when most Black Americans were poor farmers in the South and were ignored by the national Black leadership, Washington's Tuskegee Institute made their needs a high priority. It lobbied for government funds and especially from philanthropies that enabled the institute to provide model farming techniques, advanced training, and organizational skills. Even those who disagreed with Booker T. Washington could not deny the greatness of the man nor the fact that his death was a loss to his race and his country.