Ch. 10 Project- Booker T. Washington

Booker Taliaferro was born a mix slave in Franklin Country on 5th April, 1856. His father was a white man who and no one knew who he was and his mother the slave of James Burroughs. His mother married the slave Washington Ferguson. When Booker entered school he took the name of his stepfather and became known as Booker T. Washington. After emancipation, his family was so poor that he worked in factories and mines at the age of nine. When he was 16 his parents allowed him to quit work to go to school. They had no money to help him so he walked 200 miles to attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia and paid his tuition and board there by working as the janitor.

The principal of the institute was Samuel Armstrong an who was against slavery and had been commander of African American troops during the Civil War. Armstrong believed that it was important that the freed slaves received an education. Armstrong was impressed with Washington and arranged for his tuition to be paid for by a wealthy white man. Booker T. Washington carried on this idea and later he would teach in his home town, then at the Hampton Institute, and then in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. As head of the Institute, he traveled the country unceasingly to raise funds from blacks and whites both; soon he became a well-known speaker.

In 1895, Washington was asked to speak at the opening of the Cotton States Exposition, a good thing for an African American. His Atlanta Compromise speech explained his idea, that blacks could protect their rights through their own economic and moral progress rather than through legal and political changes. Although his calm stand angered some blacks who feared it would encourage the enemy of equal rights, whites approved of his views. His major achievement was to win over diverse elements among southern whites, without whose support the programs he thought and brought into being would have been impossible.