Booker T. Washington Adapted from

Adapted from Booker T. Washington – Getting into the Schoolhouse, Journey to Freedom,

Booker did not experience much freedom in his early life in as a slave in Virginia. He was owned by the Burroughs family. He often worked in and around their house doing chores, running errands, and swatting flies during mealtimes. He carried the books of the Burrough’s children to school for them. He got a glimpse of their freedom when he peered into their classrooms. Booker called it “paradise.” At age nine, in 1865, he and his family were told by a visitor to their plantation that the Civil War was over. He and his family could leave and go wherever they wanted to go. With this newfound opportunity, Booker’s family moved to Malden, West Virginia, to live with his stepfather Washington Ferguson. Freedom would still prove elusive to Booker as his stepfather put him to work in the salt and coal mines. Yet, he was permitted to attend a new school set up for African Americans provided that he worked in the mines from 4 to 9 am. It was at this school that he adopted his stepfather’s first name as his last name. Also, his mother told him about his given name “Booker Taliaferro.” From this point on, he was known as Booker T. Washington.

After teaching back in Malden for four years after he graduated and at the Hampton Institute itself starting in 1879, Washington seized upon a new opportunity. Leaders in Alabama wanted to start a school for African Americans. They sought the advice of the principal of Hampton for someone to lead it. The principal told the men that Booker T. Washington would not disappoint them. Washington created the school, which he opened with 30 students on July 4, 1881, in Tuskegee, Alabama from the ground up. At the start, the Tuskegee Institute was only a small collection of sheds and a church building, but over time Washington raised money to construct new buildings, literally brick by brick as his students learned to find the best clay on the grounds, form the bricks, fire them in the kiln, haul them to the site, and lay them in place. Not only did they create bricks for the school, but by 1900, they manufactured enough high quality bricks to sell them throughout the country. In fact, this work was part of Washington’s big idea. Students learned skills, along side some traditional academic classes in mathematics and English, and worked at the Institute to pay their way through school. Over time, students learned skills in many disciplines, such as carpentry and shoe making. Washington wanted students to return home with job skills which would translate into food and shelter. These were things he felt the African American community needed most; gradually, he believed, segregation would end and civil rights would come.

Hoping to get businessmen in the north to invest their money and do business in the south, some people organized a big event in Atlanta to show off the progress the south had made since the Civil War. The event was called the “Cotton States and International Exhibition.” By 1895, Washington had gained prominence as the leader of Tuskegee Institute. Since both the black and white communities in the south knew him and what he stood for, the organizers of the exhibition felt that he could represent the south and impress the north. The organizers knew it was a radical move to allow a black man to speak to a nearly all white audience at such an important occasion; in fact this was the first time it happened in the segregated south.

Washington was viewed as a black leader that the white community could trust. He was far less controversial than Frederick Douglass, who had died just that year. Over time, this perspective assisted Washington as he traveled around the United States giving speeches. His main goal was to raise money for Tuskegee. The better off Tuskegee was, Washington reasoned, the more people could be trained for jobs which would lead to more stable communities. More black families in these communities could lead independent and dignified lives while “peacefully and patiently work [their] way into white communities.”

Washington saw freedom and equality as something African Americans should earn over time. Washington did not want African Americans to demonstrate or otherwise push for equal rights. They should be trained to get jobs, aided by white Americans, so they could live comfortable lives. By working within the system instead of attempting to change the system, it was hoped that over many years they would gain more respect and more rights.

Some have seen Washington as a radical, someone who promotes a great deal of change in a short time: He used the Hampton model and changed the system of education for black men and women. He was the first black man in the south to speak to a largely white audience; he used this platform to advance his agenda. Would Tuskegee have grown and influenced as many lives without the influx of white money? In some cases, whole buildings were paid for by wealthy doners. Others have called him a moderate, someone trying to promote change only within the system by appeasing people in power and not threatening them. He did not speak out against a violent lynching case in Georgia or the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases which gave African Americans less power, but he publicly praised the contributions of black soldiers and pushed for more opportunities for them and called racial prejudice a “cancer gnawing at the heart of the Republic.”