Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was an American educator, author, and orator born into slavery in rural Virginia and freed as a child at the end of the Civil War. He worked in salt furnaces and coal mines before walking to the Hampton Institute to obtain an education. After graduating from Hampton in 1875 he taught in Malden, West Virginia, briefly studied at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to Hampton as a teacher. In 1881 he became the founding principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, which opened on July 4, 1881, and which he built into a leading school for Black students, emphasizing vocational training and self-reliance. He advised presidents, raised funds nationally, and set out his views in the 1895 Atlanta address and the 1901 autobiography "Up from Slavery." His accommodationist strategy was later contested by other Black leaders.