Washington giving a speech at Carnegie Hall in New York City, 1909.
Booker T. Washington with his third wife Margaret and two sons.
Washington giving a speech at Carnegie Hall in New York City, 1909.
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(Character Building is one of Booker T. Washington's class...)
Character Building is one of Booker T. Washington's classics.
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Booker Taliaferro (the Washington was added later) was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, United States, on April 5, 1856. His mother was the plantation's cook. His father, a local white man, took no responsibility for him. His mother married another slave, who escaped to West Virginia during the Civil War. She and her three children were liberated by a Union army in 1865 and, after the war, joined her husband. The stepfather put the boys to work in the salt mines in Malden.
Booker eagerly asked for education, but his stepfather conceded only when Booker agreed to toil in the mines mornings and evenings to make up for earnings lost while in school. He had known only his first name, but when pupils responded to roll call with two names, Booker desperately added a famous name, becoming Booker Washington. Learning from his mother that he already had a last name, he became Booker T. Washington. Overhearing talk about a black college in Hampton, Washington longed to go.
In 1872 Booker set out for Hampton Institute. The students learned useful trades and earned their way. Washington studied brickmasonry along with collegiate courses, graduated in 1876. Studying at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D. C. , he became disenchanted with classical education, considering his fellow students to be dandies more interested in making an impression and living off the black masses than in serving mankind. Washington won a Harvard honorary degree in 1891.
After graduation, he taught in a rural school for two years. In 1879 he was invited to teach at Hampton Institute, particularly to supervise 100 Native Americans admitted experimentally. He proved a great success in his two years on the faculty.
In 1881 citizens in Tuskegee, Alabama, asked Hampton's president to recommend a white man to head their new black college; he suggested Washington instead. The school had an annual legislative appropriation of $2,000 for salaries, but no campus, buildings, pupils, or staff. Washington had to recruit pupils and teachers and raise money for land, buildings, and equipment. Hostile rural whites who feared education would ruin black laborers accepted his demonstration that his students' practical training would help improve their usefulness. He and his students built a kiln and made the bricks with which they erected campus buildings.
Under Washington's leadership (1881 - 1915), Tuskegee Institute became an important force in black education. Tuskegee pioneered in agricultural extension, sending out demonstration wagons that brought better methods to farmers and sharecroppers. Graduates founded numerous "little Tuskegees." African Americans mired in the poverty and degradation of cotton sharecropping improved their farming techniques, income, and living conditions. Washington urged them to become capitalists, founding the National Negro Business League in 1900. By 1915 Tuskegee had 1, 500 students and a larger endowment than any other black institution.
In 1895 Washington gave his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech. Washington's position so pleased whites, North and South, that they made him the new black spokesman. He became powerful, having the deciding voice in Federal appointments of African Americans and in philanthropic grants to black institutions. Through subsidies or secret partnerships, he controlled black newspapers, stifling critics. Overawed by his power and hoping his tactics would work, many blacks went along.
However, increasingly during his last years, such black intellectuals as W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope, and William Monroe Trotter denounced his surrender of civil rights and his stressing of training in crafts, some obsolete, to the neglect of liberal education. Opposition centered in the Niagara Movement, founded in 1905, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which succeeded it in 1910. Although outwardly conciliatory, Washington secretly financed and encouraged attempts and lawsuits to block southern moves to disfranchise and segregate blacks. His death on November 14, 1915, cleared the way for blacks to return to Douglass's tactics of agitating for equal political, social, and economic rights.
Booker Washington founded Tuskegee Institute for black students. His "Atlanta Compromise" speech made him America's major black leader for 20 years. Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. It encouraged entrepreneurship among black businessmen, establishing a national network.
On April 7, 1940, Washington became the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp. In 1984 Hampton University dedicated a Booker T. Washington Memorial on campus near the historic Emancipation Oak.
(Character Building is one of Booker T. Washington's class...)
Although he shared the late Frederick Douglass's long-range goals of equality and integration, Washington renounced agitation and protest tactics. He urged blacks to subordinate demands for political and social rights, concentrating instead on improving job skills and usefulness. He appealed to white people to rely on loyal, proven black workers, pointing out that the South would advance to the degree that blacks were allowed to secure education and become productive.
Quotations:
"The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house."
"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed."
People called Washington the "Wizard of Tuskegee" because of his highly developed political skills, and his creation of a nationwide political machine based on the black middle class, white philanthropy, and Republican Party support.
Washington was married three times. His first wife Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia. e helped her gain entrance into the Hampton Institute, and Washington and Smith were married in the summer of 1882. They had one child, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in May 1884.
Washington next wed Olivia A. Davidson in 1885. They had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr. and Ernest Davidson Washington, before she died in 1889.
In 1893 Washington married Margaret James Murray. They had no children together, but she helped rear Washington's three children.
