Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915)

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856–1915), born into slavery in southwestern Virginia, became the most widely known African American leader and educator of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The founder and president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he advocated racial uplift through material improvement rooted in practical skills and individual industry. His ideology clashed with that of many African Americans—notably W. E. B. Du Bois—who favored a path to racial advancement shaped by political and cultural progress and charged that Washington's emphasis on vocational means would hinder racial equality. These divergent ideologies sparked enduring debates about the objectives and methods of education, with Washington and the Tuskegee curriculum firmly committed to industrial training or economic betterment in the work areas immediately available to African Americans. Radical proponents of racial uplift viewed this position as simply accommodating views of Whites who preferred a Black menial labor force to Black citizens schooled in humanistic and liberal traditions.

Washington was born to a slave, Jane, and an unidentified White father on a farm owned by the James Burroughs family in Hale's Ford, Virginia. The exact date of his birth has never been fully verified, but for practical purposes he took it as April 5, 1856, making him about 4 years younger than his half brother, John, and 4 years older than his half sister, Amanda. His home was a one-room cabin within a community of aunts and uncles who served in various work capacities in the fields and farmhouse. With no shoes, one shirt, and no opportunity to learn reading or writing, young Washington ran errands and performed farm chores while his mother slaved as the farm cook. Several years after Booker was born, Jane married Washington Ferguson, a slave on a nearby farm, who escaped to West Virginia during the Civil War. Jane, with her two sons and daughter, joined him in Malden, West Virginia, soon after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Booker Washington and his brother were sent to work, first packing salt from the saline springs in the area; they later switched to mining coal. In his early teens, Washington worked as a houseboy for the wife of General Lewis Ruffner, the owner of the area's salt and coal mines.

Self-taught in basic literacy, Washington was able to attend a local school several months each year by working early mornings and late afternoons. He long maintained, however, that his most valuable lessons came from his work for Viola Ruffner, a Vermont native who demanded perfection, honesty, and systematic organization. To continue his schooling, Washington managed to get to Hampton (Virginia) Normal and Industrial Institute by scraping together just enough money for transportation and then working at the school to support his room, board, books, and clothes. He thrived on Hampton's system of classroom instruction, industrial training, and manual labor; and he graduated in 1875. After a brief stint as a teacher back in West Virginia, he studied for a year at a small Baptist institution, Wayland Seminary, in Washington, D.C. There he discovered the striking [Page 934]contrast between a classical curriculum that included Greek and Latin and Hampton's pragmatic emphasis on basic life skills and employment training. By the spring of 1879, he was back at Hampton as director of the institute's night school and resident superintendent at the dormitory for the school's large contingent of American Indian male students.

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