Booker t washington why is he important

Sometime after Booker's birth, his mother was married to Washington Ferguson, a slave. A daughter, Amanda, was born to this marriage. James, Booker's younger half-brother, was adopted. Booker's elder brother, John, was also the son of a White man.

Booker spent his first nine years as a slave on the Burroughs farm. In , his mother took her children to Malden, West Virginia, to join her husband, who had gone there earlier and found work in the salt mines. At age nine, Booker was put to work packing salt. Between the ages of ten and twelve, he worked in a coal mine. He attended school while continuing to work in the mines. In , he went to work as a houseboy for the wife of Gen. Lewis Ruffner, owner of the mines.

In , at age sixteen, Booker T. The dominant personality at the school, which had opened in under the auspices of the American Missionary Association, was the principal, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the son of American missionaries in Hawaii.

Armstrong, who had commanded Black troops in the Civil War, believed that the progress of freedmen and their descendants depended on education of a special sort, which would be practical and utilitarian and would at the same time inculcate character and morality. Washington traveled most of the distance from Malden to Hampton on foot, arriving penniless.

His entrance examination to Hampton was to clean a room. The teacher inspected his work with a spotless, white handkerchief. Booker was admitted. He was given work as a janitor to pay the cost of his room and board, and Armstrong arranged for a White benefactor to pay his tuition.

At Hampton, Washington studied academic subjects and agriculture, which included work in the fields and pigsties. He also learned lessons in personal cleanliness and good manners. His special interest was public speaking and debate. He was jubilant when he was chosen to speak at his commencement. The most important part of his experience at Hampton was his association with Armstrong, who he described in his autobiography as "a great man - the noblest, rarest human being it has ever been my privilege to meet.

After graduating from Hampton with honors in , Washington returned to Malden to teach. For eight months he was a student at Wayland Seminary, an institution with a curriculum that was entirely academic. This experience reinforced his belief in an educational system that emphasized practical skills and self-help.

In , Washington returned to Hampton to teach in a program for American Indians. Washington graduated from Hampton in with high marks. In , he was chosen to speak at Hampton's graduation ceremonies, where afterward General Armstrong offered Washington a job teaching at Hampton.

General Armstrong was asked to recommend a white man to run the school but instead recommended Washington. Classes were first held in an old church, while Washington traveled all over the countryside promoting the school and raising money. He reassured white people that nothing in the Tuskegee program would threaten white supremacy or pose any economic competition to white people.

Under Washington's leadership, Tuskegee became a leading school in the country. Washington put much of himself into the school's curriculum, stressing the virtues of patience, enterprise, and thrift. He taught that economic success for African Americans would take time, and that subordination to white people was a necessary evil until African Americans could prove they were worthy of full economic and political rights.

He believed that if African Americans worked hard and obtained financial independence and cultural advancement, they would eventually win acceptance and respect from the white community.

In , Washington publicly put forth his philosophy on race relations in a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, known as the "Atlanta Compromise.

This started a firestorm in parts of the African American community, especially in the North. Activists like W. Du Bois who was working as a professor at Atlanta University at the time deplored Washington's conciliatory philosophy and his belief that African Americans were only suited to vocational training.

Du Bois criticized Washington for not demanding equality for African Americans, as granted by the 14th Amendment , and subsequently became an advocate for full and equal rights in every realm of a person's life. Though Washington had done much to help advance many African Americans, there was some truth in the criticism. During Washington's rise as a national spokesperson for African Americans, they were systematically excluded from the vote and political participation through Black codes and Jim Crow laws as rigid patterns of segregation and discrimination became institutionalized throughout the South and much of the country.

But the fact that Roosevelt asked Washington to dine with him inferring the two were equal was unprecedented and controversial, causing an ferocious uproar among white people. Both President Roosevelt and his successor, President William Howard Taft , used Washington as an adviser on racial matters, partly because he accepted racial subservience. His White House visit and the publication of his autobiography, Up from Slavery , brought him both acclaim and indignation from many Americans.

While some African Americans looked upon Washington as a hero, others, like Du Bois, saw him as a traitor. Many Southern white people, including some prominent members of Congress, saw Washington's success as an affront and called for action to put African Americans "in their place.

Washington was a complex individual, who lived during a precarious time in advancing racial equality. Booker Taliaferro Washington was the foremost black educator of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also had a major influence on southern race relations and was the dominant figure in black public affairs from until his death in Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia backcountry, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia.

After a secondary education at Hampton Institute, he taught an upgraded school and experimented briefly with the study of law and the ministry, but a teaching position at Hampton decided his future career. Though Washington offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both northern philanthropic foundations and southern leaders were already promoting, he became its chief black exemplar and spokesman. In his advocacy of Tuskegee Institute and its educational method, Washington revealed the political adroitness and accommodationist philosophy that were to characterize his career in the wider arena of race leadership.

He convinced southern white employers and governors that Tuskegee offered an education that would keep blacks "down on the farm" and in the trades. To prospective northern donors and particularly the new self- made millionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie he promised the inculcation of the Protestant work ethic. To blacks living within the limited horizons of the post- Reconstruction South, Washington held out industrial education as the means of escape from the web of sharecropping and debt and the achievement of attainable, petit-bourgeois goals of self-employment, landownership, and small business.

Washington cultivated local white approval and secured a small state appropriation, but it was northern donations that made Tuskegee Institute by the best-supported black educational institution in the country.