Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington, a writer, black leader, educator, was the son of his white owner and a black slave, born in 1856.

Booker T. Washington was allowed to go to school, although not so he could learn anything; educating slaves was a crime. But he went to school in Franklin County so he could carry the books for one of his master, James Burroughs's, daughters.

Freed after emancipation in 1865, he worked in the salt mines in West Virginia, rising each morning at 4a.m. so he could attend school in the afternoons. Later, he took a job as a houseboy by a woman who encouraged his continuing education. When Booker was 16, he walked the nearly 500 miles to Virginia to enroll in a new school for black students. He knew that even poor students could get an education at Hampton Institute, paying their way by working, and the head teacher, suspicious of his country ways and ragged clothes, admitted him only after he cleaned a room to her satisfaction.

Working for his education at Hampton was the last time Booker toiled as a laborer or houseboy. He soon became an instructor at the school, and at age 25, he became the principal and guiding force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he founded in 1881. Booker T. Washington became recognized as the nation's foremost black educator, choosing to enlist the cooperation of wealthy whites to raise funds to build and run hundreds of community schools and institutes of higher education for blacks.

Yet Washington was not without critics. Many charged that his conservative manner undermined the quest for racial equality, and because he chose to work with whites, Washington was criticized by W.E.B. Du Bois; his policies repudiated by the civil rights movement.

However, now we know that Washington secretly funded anti-segregationist activities, and never wavered in his belief in freedom: "From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery."

And toward the end of his life, Booker T. Washington moved away from a conservative, accommodating policy. He began to attack racism, and in 1915 he joined ranks with former critics to protest the stereotypical portrayal of blacks in a new movie, Birth of a Nation.

Some months later he died at age 59.