Booker T. Washington

Who was Booker T. Washington?

Booker Taliaferro Washington was an African-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 of the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery, who became the leading voice of the disfranchised former slaves newly oppressed by the discriminatory laws enacted in the post reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1895 his Atlanta compromise called for avoiding confrontation over segregation and instead putting more reliance on long-term educational and economic advancement in the black community.

His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a state college for blacks in Alabama. As the threat of lynching reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech in Atlanta that made him nationally famous. The speech called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship. His message was that now was not the time to challenge Jim Crow segregation and the disfranchisement of blacks voters in the South. Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term goal of building the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. Secretly, he supported court challenges to segregation. Black militants in the North, led by W.E.B. DuBois, at first supported the Atlanta Compromise but after 1909 set up the NAACP and tried to challenge Washington's political machine for leadership in the black community. Decades after Washington's death in 1915, the Civil Rights movement generally moved away from his policies to take the more militant NAACP approach.

Famous Quotes:

• There are two ways of exerting one's strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
• The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.
• Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.
• If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
• Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.
• Character is power.
• Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
• I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high water mark of pure and useful living.
• Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which one has overcome while trying to succeed.
• We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.