Thesis Statement: Booker T. Washington was an astute politician and a pragmatist. He was not an apologist or an enabler of segregation. He recognized that changes for black Americans would need slow. He believed in the idea that steady progress towards equality for all Americans was a goal worth working for, and he worked his entire life to elevate the status of Black Americans.
On April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington, was born in slavery on a 207-acre tobacco farm in Virginia. He went to school in Franklin County - not as a student, but to carry books of one of the daughters of his owner. Because it was illegal for a slave to learn to read and write, Washington received no education. He moved with his family just after the Civil War ended to Malden, West Virginia where his family was able to find work.
Washington writes in The Booker T. Washington Papers (1972) that as a young boy, he took a dangerous and difficult job in a salt mine. His workday began at 4 a.m. Even then, he had a plan. His plan was to work in the mines in the morning so he could attend school in the afternoon. Within a few years, a wealthy family who encouraged his desire to learn took in Booker as a houseboy.
In his best-known book, the autobiography Up From Slavery, Washington begins to tell tells the story of his life beginning with his earliest recollections. The autobiography offers insights and inspiration to readers. Washington chronicles his journey from West Virginia to attend a school training blacks as teachers. Washington writes that at age 16, he walked much of the 500 miles to Virginia to enroll at the Hampton Institute. General Samuel Armstrong ran Hampton Institute. Armstrong and the institution he created were to become the one great influence in Washington's life. Armstrong believed in work, study, hygiene, morality, self-discipline and self-reliance. It was not a place for slackers. Armstrong's purpose was to trai
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