Booker T. Washington
c. 1856 – 14 November 1915
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was an American educator, author, and orator who was born into slavery in Virginia and became the most prominent Black leader in the United States between 1895 and 1915. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and championed vocational education and economic self-reliance for African Americans. His 1895 Atlanta address and autobiography Up from Slavery made him nationally influential, though his accommodationist approach was contested by contemporaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Booker T. Washington.
- Abdülhamid II (1842–1918) Overlapped 59 years →
- Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) Overlapped 59 years →
- Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) Overlapped 59 years →
- Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) Overlapped 59 years →
- Georg Cantor (1845–1918) Overlapped 59 years →
- Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) Overlapped 59 years →
Life events
Booker Taliaferro was born enslaved on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia; his exact birth date was never recorded.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAfter emancipation at the end of the Civil War, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines as a boy.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgWashington worked his way through Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he absorbed the industrial-education philosophy of its founder Samuel C. Armstrong.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAt age 25, Washington opened the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he led for the rest of his life and built into a leading center of Black education.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgWashington's speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, later called the Atlanta Compromise, urged Black economic advancement while accepting social segregation, making him nationally famous.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgWashington organized the National Negro Business League in Boston to promote Black entrepreneurship and economic self-help.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHis autobiography Up from Slavery became a bestseller and remains one of the most widely read American slave narratives.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgWashington's dinner with President Roosevelt, the first time a Black American was entertained at the White House, provoked a national controversy.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgWashington collapsed in New York and died shortly after returning to Tuskegee, at about 59 years of age; he was buried on the institute's campus.
Source: en.wikipedia.org