|
Dromo's Den
|
|
[Up] [Dromo's Den] Booker T. Washington Biography WASHINGTON, Booker Taliaferro (c.1858–1915). An American educator of the negro, born near Hale’s Ford, Franklin Co., Va. He was a plantation slave, the son of a mulatto slave and of a white man. After the Civil War he removed to Malden, W. Va., where he was employed in a salt furnace and later in a coal mine and where he obtained his first instruction in a night school. After much difficulty and hardship he made his way to the Hampton (Va.) Normal and Agricultural Institute, where he defrayed the cost of his board by acting as janitor, and studied for three years (1872–75). He then taught school for two years at Malden, studied further for eight months (1878–79) in the Wayland Seminary of Washington, D. C., and in 1879 was appointed an instructor at Hampton Institute. There he was successful in directing the work of about 75 Indians of whose education General Armstrong was then making trial, and introduced and took charge of the night school, which soon became an important feature. In 1881 he was appointed to establish a colored normal school at Tuskegee, Ala., the State Legislature having granted an annual appropriation of $2000 to be used for the salaries of instructors. He opened the school in a dilapidated shanty and a church, with 30 scholars, and himself as the only teacher, but he left it with many buildings, hundreds of acres of land, 1500 students and 185 teachers, and a remarkable spirit of devotion and aspiration. His efforts to better the condition of this institution led to his appearance at many important public assemblages, religious and secular, both North and South, and his addresses on these occasions soon made him known as a remarkably fluent and effective speaker. He became known, moreover, not only as a man who was tremendously in earnest, but as a far-sighted and practical reformer. His most notable address was that given at the opening of the Atlanta (Ga.) Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895, on the subject "The New Negro." In 1900 he organized the National Negro Business League at Boston, Mass. He received an honorary M. A. from Harvard in 1896 and an LL. D. from Dartmouth in 1901. When abroad he was received by the King of Denmark and addressed the National Liberal Club of London. He died at Tuskegee, Nov. 14, 1915. His publications include: The Future of the American Negro (1899); Sowing and Reaping (1900); The Story of My Life and Work (1900; new ed., 1915); a remarkable autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901); Character-Building (1902); Working with the Hands (1904), a sequel to Up from Slavery; Tuskegee and Its People (1905); Putting the Most Into Life (1906); Frederick Douglass (1907); The Negro in Business (1907); The Story of the Negro (1909); My Larger Education (1911); The Man Farthest Down. (1912). Consult also: Thrasher, Tuskegee; Its Story and Its Work (Boston, 1900); W. H. Holtzclaw, The Black Man’s Burden (New York, 1915); Stowe and Scott, Booker T. Washington: Builder of a Civilization (Garden City, N. Y., 1916), with introduction by Washington. See Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 353. |