Overview

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was an African American educator, author, orator, and adviser to multiple presidents of the United States, who, between 1890 and 1915, was the dominant leader in the African American community. He came from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. A key proponent of African American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League, his base was the Tuskegee Institute, an historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the Atlanta compromise , which brought him national fame. He called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. Washington published five books during his lifetime with the aid of ghost-writers, the best known of which is Up from Slavery (1901) describing his personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, the obstacles he overcame to get an education, and his work establishing vocational schools to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful skills to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. In The Man Farthest Down (1912), written in collaboration with Robert E Park, he offers the reader a Record of Observation and Study in Europe based on his tour of 1910 to investigate living and working conditions of the poorest and most discriminated against communities across Europe.

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