I would like to dedicate this book to my mother and father who have taught me the difference in right and wrong and to treat people fairly my whole life.

This book is in honor of a person who made a difference in society and I hope that I can learn from him.

This is the story of my Life...

Booker T Washington

My name is Booker T Washington. Although I was born a slave on a small farm in western Virginia, I later became the foremost black educator, power broker and institution builder of my time.

I was born in 1856 and died in 1915 from heart problems.

I was born into slavery in Virginia and my mother was named Jane, an African-American slave. After emancipation, my mother moved our family to West Virginia to join our father, Washington Ferguson. As a young man, I worked my way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (a historically black college now Hampton University) and attended college at Wayland Seminary (now Virginia Union University).

With my humble but stern rearing I worked in a salt furnace when I was ten and served as a houseboy for a white family where I first learned the virtues of frugality, cleanliness, and personal morality.

In 1881, I founded the Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama devoted to training teachers. I was also behind the formation of the National Negro Business League 20 years later, and I served as an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

I often expressed my vision for my race in my direction of the school. I believed that by providing needed skills to society, African Americans would play their part, leading to acceptance by white Americans. I believed that blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by acting as responsible, reliable American citizens. Shortly after the Spanish–American War, President William McKinley and most of his cabinet even visited me.

Although I did not agree with other black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and drew ire for my seeming acceptance of segregation, I was recognized for my educational advancements and attempts to promote economic self-reliance among African Americans.

From my southern small-town, I created a national political network of schools, newspapers, and the National Negro Business League in 1901. In response to the age of Jim Crow, I offered the doctrine of accommodation, agreeing in social and political inequality for blacks while training them for economic self-determination in the industrial arts.

In my Atlanta Compromise address, delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, I struck the keynotes of racial accommodationism by saying; “Cast down your buckets where you are,” I urged blacks. “In all things that are purely social,” I announced to attentive whites, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Some say that I sustained my power as an educational statesman by some ruthless and duplicitous methods. Rival black newspapers, educators, and thinkers were frequently intimidated by my brand of so called boss politics. Black newspaper editors and aspiring young intellectuals risked ostracism and unemployment if they embraced political activism rather than my accommodationist social policy.

Growing black and white opposition to my agreement in disfranchisement and Jim Crow led to the formation of the Niagra Movement (1905-1909) and the NAACP , activist organizations working for civil and political rights as well as against lynching. But actually

I labored secretly against Jim Crow laws and racial violence, writing letters in code names and protecting blacks from lynch mobs, though these efforts were rarely known in my own time.