Booker T. Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in Hale's Ford, Virginia, on the fifth of April 1856. Emancipated at nine, he walked five hundred miles to enroll at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1872. He completed his education there and at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to teach at Hampton.

In 1881 he was appointed at the age of twenty-five as the founding principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama — at its founding a single rented church and a small shanty. He served as Tuskegee's principal for the next thirty-four years and built it into the largest and most resourced historically Black institution of higher education in the United States, with more than one hundred buildings, an endowment of two million dollars at his death, and an alumni body that became the professional Black middle class of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His Atlanta Exposition Speech of 1895 — in which he urged Black Americans to seek economic uplift through industrial education rather than direct political confrontation with Southern white supremacy — made him the most politically influential Black American of his generation and the principal interlocutor between the Black community and white American power. He dined at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, conferred with Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald, and steered millions of dollars in philanthropic giving toward Black education.

W. E. B. Du Bois broke with him publicly in 1903 over the limits of accommodationism; the debate between them shaped the next sixty years of Black political thought.

He died at Tuskegee on the fourteenth of November 1915, age fifty-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of Tuskegee and the most institutionally consequential Black American of his generation.