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Booker T. Washington
(1856-1915)
Who Was Booker T. Washington?
Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington put himself through school and became a teacher after the Civil War. In 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama (now known as Tuskegee University), which grew immensely and focused on training African Americans in agricultural pursuits. A political adviser and writer, Washington clashed with intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois over the best avenues for racial uplift.
Early Life
Born to an enslaved person on April 5, 1856, Washington's life had little promise early on. In Franklin County, Virginia, as in most states prior to the Civil War, the child of an enslaved person also became enslaved. Washington's mother, Jane, worked as a cook for plantation owner James Burroughs. His father was an unknown white man, most likely from a nearby plantation. Washington and his mother lived in a one-room log cabin with a large fireplace, which also served as the
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Background and Boyhood
That Washington would komma to symbolize such divergent ideas—that, indeed, he would become a nationally known symbol of anything at all—would have seemed almost unimaginable at the moment of his birth. He was born into slavery on a tobacco farm near the tiny town of Hale’s Ford in Franklin County late in the 1850s. The precise year of his birth has been a matter of debate. As Washington observes wryly in the opening paragraph of Up from Slavery, “I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time.” Possessing no formal birth certificate, he had to rely on the memories of others and make educated guesses han själv , sometimes placing his birth as early as 1854 and other times as late as 1859. After his death, his older half-brother claimed to have seen the date April 5, 1856, recorded next to Washington’s name in a family Bible and 1856 is the year that appears on his headstone at his gravesite in Tuskegee.
His paternity is sim
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Booker T. Washington Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is probably best known as the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Macon County. He was a leading voice for industrial-vocational education and a measured approach toward gaining civil rights for blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many contemporary African American civil rights leaders, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, criticized his emphasis on industrial education over liberal arts education and called for immediate access to political participation, accusing Washington of being an accommodationist. It was later revealed that Washington secretly supported more activist civil rights causes, however. He covertly provided funding for organizations that fought to end lynching. When southern states began to disband colored militia in 1905, he asked sekreterare of War William Howard Taft to intervene, and when Pres. Theodore Roosevelt dismissed bla