Valerie Mangum ©2004

Booker T. Washington Era

The 1870s to the start of World War I, the period when African American educator Booker T. Washington was gaining prominence, was also a difficult time for African Americans. The vote proved elusive and civil rights began to vanish through court action. Lynching, racial violence, and slavery's twin children peonage and sharecropping arose as deadly quagmires on the path to full citizenship.

Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia backcountry in 1856, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia.

The Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, fired his ambition to learn to read, as nothing had done before.

Booker T. Washington managed to get a primary education that allowed his probationary admittance to Hampton Institute. There he proved to be an exemplary student, teacher, and speaker.

Tuskegee Institute was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 under a charter from the Alabama legislature for the purpose of training teachers in Alabama.

Washington and his students built the school, named Tuskegee Institute, from the ground up.

• Tuskegee's program provided academic and vocational training

• Students built their own buildings

• Students produced their own food

• Students provided most of their own basic necessities

The Tuskegee faculty taught the students basic skills that they could share with African American communities throughout the South.

Booker T. Washington was a popular educator and speaker.

He became the first black ever to dine at the White House with the President Theodore Roosevelt.

Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise Speech

•The speech catapulted him into national prominence.

•In the text he challenged both races to adjust to post-emancipation realities.

•Races could work together

•Offered reconciliation between the races

•Racial violence and discrimination against blacks escalated

•African American leaders believe that the speech represented capitulation.

An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed EphemeraBooker T. Washington. by R. V. Randolph. Seattle, 1913

Booker T. Washington died in 1915 at the age of 59, after improving the lives of many people, both black and white.

He is buried at Tuskegee University in Alamaba.

Resources

• Images - "Alabama Hall, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama." Detroit Publishing Company copyright 1906. Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880 - 1920, Library of Congress.

• Images - Academic Affairs Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill