Booker T. Washington was an African American educator, activist, and orator. He was one of the dominant leaders of the African American community from 1890 to 1915, advocating for change through self-help and education.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born a slave on a Virginia plantation, where his black mother was enslaved. He never knew who his father was, except that he was a white man who lived on the plantation. He didn’t even know the exact year of his birth.
When the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in 1865, Washington’s mother moved the family to West Virginia, where her husband lived. There, at the age of 9, Washington first began to teach himself to read and started attending school. Education was very important to Washington. After earning enough money working in coal mines, he went to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, and later to Wayland Seminary.
This love for education is what got him the job as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. At the Institute, he became a voice for the African American community during the reconstruction years of Jim Crow laws and segregation. He advocated that blacks should get an education, provide for themselves, and work as a community to overcome the adversity in their way.
Washington built a network of middle class blacks and church leaders, along with white philanthropists and politicians, to work against the racism that surrounded them. His Atlanta Compromise speech, given at the Tuskegee Institute, brought him national fame. His love of education, desire to see change in the world, and the conviction of his ideals is what makes Booker T. Washington an icon today.