Booker T. Washington

“Equality Through Knowledge”
an essay on the views of
Booker T. Washington

Born a slave, Booker T. Washington rose to become a commonly recognized leader of the Negro race in America.   Washington continually strove to be successful and to show other black men and women how they too could raise themselves.   Washington’s method of uplifting was education of the head, the hand, and the heart.   From his founding of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881 to his death in 1915 Booker T. Washington exerted a tremendous influence on the people that surrounded him.   With his emphasis on industrial education Washington’s approach gave African-Americans hope of accomplishment and success.  
Growing up in Franklin County, Virginia, Booker was a young slave living on a plantation in a cold, dismal cabin with his mother being the plantation cook.   He struggled through the hardships not unlike all the other slaves in the country.   Booker T. Washington did not know his own father, which sounds very terrible, but was nothing unusual to young children of enslaved mothers.   However Booker’s thoughts and feelings were different from what you’d suspect.   Booker states, “ I do not find especial fault with him (his father).   He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at the time.”(4)
Booker T. Washington was engulfed in labor throughout his adolescence and young boyhood days, joining his step-father in working in salt furnaces and coal-mines after the civil war.   Of course the labor force in this country was predominately slaves, and after the civil war black people were paid little money to do some of the same work.   The whole machinery of slavery was constructed as to cause labor, as a rule, to be looked upon as a sign of degradation and inferiority.   The slave system took the spirit of self-reliance and self-help out of white people.   Again, Booker T.... [continues]

Read full essay