Photo: Harris & Ewing, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, around 1856. After emancipation his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines as a boy.
He walked and worked his way to Hampton Institute in Virginia and graduated in 1875.
Tuskegee
In 1881 he was hired to lead a new school for Black teachers in Tuskegee, Alabama. It opened in a church building with about 30 students. Students made bricks and built many of the campus buildings themselves.
By his death the school had more than 100 buildings and about 1,500 students. He hired George Washington Carver in 1896.
A national figure
His 1895 speech in Atlanta, later called the Atlanta Compromise, urged Black Southerners to focus on education and economic progress rather than demand immediate political equality. W.E.B. Du Bois and others criticized the approach.
His autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” appeared in 1901. That year he became the first Black American invited to dine at the White House, with President Theodore Roosevelt. He died in 1915.
