Booker Taliaferro Washington, American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. 
Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants.
In 1856, Washington was born into slavery in Virginia as the son of Jane, an African-American slave. After emancipation, she moved the family to West Virginia to join her husband Washington Ferguson.
As a young man, Washington worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) and attended college at Wayland Seminary (now Virginia Union University).
In 1881, Washington was named as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, founded for the higher education of blacks.
He attained national prominence for his Atlanta Address of 1895, which attracted the attention of politicians and the public.
He attained national prominence for his Atlanta Address of 1895, which attracted the attention of politicians and the public.
Washington became a popular spokesperson for African-American citizens. He built a nationwide network of supporters in many black communities, with black ministers, educators, and businessmen composing his core supporters.
He never knew the day, month, and year of his birth, but the year on his headstone reads 1856. Nor did he ever know his father, said to be a white man who resided on a neighboring plantation. The man played no financial or emotional role in Washington's life.
From his earliest years, the slave boy was known simply as "Booker," with no middle or surname, in the practice of the time. His mother, her relatives and his siblings struggled with the demands of slavery.
He later recalled:
"I cannot recall a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God's blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. [...]
"I cannot recall a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God's blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. [...]
[...] On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten to the children very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another."
When he was nine, Booker and his family in Virginia gained freedom under the Emancipation Proclamation as US troops occupied their region.
In 1881, the Hampton Institute president Samuel C. Armstrong recommended then-25-year-old Washington to become the first leader of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University), the new normal school (teachers' college) in Alabama.
The new school opened on July 4, 1881, initially using space in a local church. The next year, Washington purchased a former plantation, which became the permanent site of the campus.
Phptp: Booker T. Washington's house at Tuskegee University.
Phptp: Booker T. Washington's house at Tuskegee University.
Under his direction, his students literally built their own school: making bricks, constructing classrooms, barns and outbuildings; and growing their own crops and raising livestock; both for learning and to provide for most of the basic necessities.
Both men and women had to learn trades as well as academics. Washington helped raise funds to establish and operate hundreds of small community schools and institutions of higher educations for blacks.
The Tuskegee faculty used all the activities to teach the students basic skills to take back to their mostly rural black communities throughout the South.
The main goal was not to produce farmers and tradesmen, but teachers of farming and trades who taught in the new schools and colleges for blacks across the South.
The school expanded over the decades, adding programs and departments, to become the present-day Tuskegee University.
Washington led the institution for the rest of his life, more than 30 years.
Washington led the institution for the rest of his life, more than 30 years.
As he developed it, adding to both the curriculum and the facilities on the campus, he became a prominent national leader among African Americans, with considerable influence with wealthy white philanthropists and politicians.
Washington expressed his vision for his race in his direction of the school. He believed that by providing needed skills to society, African Americans would play their part, leading to acceptance by white Americans.
Washington was a dominant figure of the African-American community, then still overwhelmingly based in the South, from 1890 to his death in 1915. He was considered as a popular spokesman for African-American citizens.
Representing the last generation of black leaders born into slavery, he was generally perceived as a supporter of education for freedmen and their descendants in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era South through basic education and training in manual and domestic labor trades.
Throughout the final twenty years of his life, he maintained his standing through a nationwide network of supporters including black educators, ministers, editors, and businessmen, especially those who supported his views on social and educational issues for blacks.
He also gained access to top national white leaders in politics, philanthropy and education, raised large sums, was consulted on race issues, and was awarded honorary degrees from leading American universities.
Washington's work on education problems helped him enlist both the moral and substantial financial support of many major white philanthropists.
He became a friend of such self-made men as Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers; Sears, Roebuck and Company President Julius Rosenwald; and George Eastman, inventor of roll film, founder of Eastman Kodak, and developer of a major part of the photography industry.
These individuals and many other wealthy men and women funded his causes, including Hampton and Tuskegee institutes.
The schools which Washington supported were founded primarily to produce teachers, as education was critical for the black community following emancipation.
The schools which Washington supported were founded primarily to produce teachers, as education was critical for the black community following emancipation.
Washington was married three times. In his autobiography Up from Slavery, he gave all three of his wives credit for their contributions at Tuskegee.
His first wife Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia, the same Kanawha River Valley town where Washington had lived from age nine to sixteen. They had one child, Portia M. Washington, born in 1883. Fannie died in May 1884.
In 1885 the widower Washington married again, to Olivia A. Davidson. They had two sons, Booker T. Washington Jr. and Ernest Davidson Washington, before she died in 1889.
In 1893 Washington married Margaret James Murray (photo). She was from Mississippi and had graduated from Fisk University, a historically black college. They had no children together, but she helped rear Washington's three children. Murray outlived Washington and died in 1925.
Despite his extensive travels and widespread work, Washington continued as principal of Tuskegee. His health was deteriorating rapidly in 1915; he collapsed in New York City and was diagnosed by two different doctors as having Bright's disease (chronic nephritis).
Told he only had a few days left to live, Washington expressed a desire to die at Tuskegee.
He boarded a train and arrived there shortly after midnight on November 14, 1915.
He boarded a train and arrived there shortly after midnight on November 14, 1915.
Booker T. Washington died a few hours later at the age of 59. He was buried on the campus of Tuskegee University near the University Chapel.
His death was believed at the time to have been a result of congestive heart failure, aggravated by overwork.
In March 2006, with the permission of his descendants, examination of medical records indicated that he died of hypertension, with a blood pressure more than twice normal, confirming what had long been suspected.
Washington's first daughter by Fannie, Portia Marshall Washington (1883-1978), was a trained pianist who married Tuskegee educator and architect William Sidney Pittman in 1900. They had three children.
However, Pittman faced several difficulties in trying to ply his trade while his wife built her musical profession. Eventually, after Pittman assaulted their daughter Fannie in the midst of an argument, Portia took Fannie and left Pittman to resettle at Tuskegee.
She was removed from the faculty in 1939 because she did not have an academic degree, but she opened her own piano teaching practice for a few years. After retiring in 1944 at the age of 61, she dedicated her efforts in the 1940s to memorializing her father.
Booker Jr. (1887-1945) married Nettie Blair Hancock (1887–1972). Their daughter, Nettie Hancock Washington (1917-1982), taught at a high school in Washington, D.C. for twenty years.
She married physician Frederick Douglass III, great-grandson of famed abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass.
Nettie and Frederick's daughter, Nettie Washington Douglass, and her son, Kenneth Morris, co-founded the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, an anti-sex trafficking organization.
For his contributions to American society, Washington was granted an honorary master's degree from Harvard University in 1896 and an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College in 1901.
At his death, Tuskegee's endowment was close to $2 million.
At his death, Tuskegee's endowment was close to $2 million.
*Done*
