Booker T. Washington’s tireless efforts on behalf of African American advancement were reinterpreted anachronistically in some later histories. (Library of Congress)
Booker T. Washington was a champion and icon of African American progress in his time, and the touchstone for debate in ours.
Booker Taliaferro Washington, the founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama, was asked to deliver the “Negro address” at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, an economic fair to celebrate the South’s attempts to join in American industrial growth. The thirty-nine-year-old had been born a slave in Virginia, the child of an illiterate slave mother and a white father who did not acknowledge him as son. As an adolescent in West Virginia, Washington struggled mightily to receive the rudiments of an education, because he understood schooling was the necessary prerequisite for him to rise in the world. He was born without a surname, but emblematic of his ambitions and patriotism, he named himself after the father of the country. He went penniless to Hampton Institute, where he graduated and in 1881 was recommended to white men in Tuskegee who wanted to establish a school for “colored youth.”
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