BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

Booker T. Washington recalled his childhood in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. He was born in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm which, despite its small size, he always referred to as a "plantation." His mother was a cook, his father a white man from a nearby farm.
Booker T. Washington was the first national leader for millions of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. The founder of an all-black school in Alabama called the Tuskegee Institute, Washington urged the South's eight million freed slaves and their descendants to continue to farm and do manual labor. Through hard work, he believed, they would prosper and someday enjoy the same rights and privileges as white Americans. He cautioned blacks to avoid political and civil rights battles, but to work instead to become property owners and merchants, and to create their own thriving, self-sufficient communities.