Atlanta Exposition Speech

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery on April 5, 1856. His mother, Jane, was an enslaved Black woman, and his father a white man whose identity remains unknown. Booker and his mother lived and worked on the estate of James T. and Elizabeth Burroughs in Franklin County, Virginia. In 1860, Jane married an enslaved man named Washington Ferguson, who left his small family after the outbreak of the Civil War to escape to West Virginia. After the war and the application of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the nine-year-old Booker and his mother made their way to Malden, West Virginia, where they joined Ferguson. Here, Booker contributed to his household income by packing salt, working in a coal mine, and finally as a servant to the mine owner’s wife. He also attended school, and it was then—for the purpose of registering for school—that he adopted his stepfather’s first name as his last name.

When he reached the age of 15, Washington walked and hitchhiked back to Virginia to attend the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) for freed Black people. The principal was General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, commander of Black troops during the Civil War, and he implemented a program at Hampton combining moral education with agricultural training, a combination that he believed could best support his recently freed students. Washington adopted Armstrong’s educational philosophy and carried it with him throughout what would become a storied career as an educator, orator, and author.

With the end of Reconstruction and the subsequent proliferation of Jim Crow laws, Washington joined the faculty at Hampton and began considering whether his and Armstrong’s educational approach could serve the cause of social justice beyond preparing freed Black people for paid employment. In 1881, Armstrong sent Washington to Tuskegee, Alabama, to open the Tuskegee Normal School (to train Black teachers), which would soon become the Tuskegee Institute, and eventually Tuskegee University. Washington applied the educational principles he learned at Hampton, focusing on economic independence as a route to full citizenship. Part of Washington’s agenda was to create a pathway to success for his students that was unlikely to antagonize their white neighbors. To some of his critics, however, that meant he was teaching Black people to accept inferior conditions and opportunities.

Washington criticized Black agitation against inequality as counterproductive. As what some called the “Great Accommodator,” Washington became an enormously successful fundraiser for his school, supported by (mainly) Northern philanthropists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. By the time he delivered the speech in Atlanta in 1895, he was the best-known Black leader in the country (Frederick Douglass had died in February of that year). The speech also contributed to making him the most controversial leader, as it offended more radical activists like W. E. B. Du Bois (Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and Cornel West. The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country. New York: The Free Press, 2000. p. 32).

Washington was also a prolific author. His first published work, The Story of My Life and Work (1900), was followed by a second autobiography, the bestselling Up from Slavery (1901), which took his ideas about education and race relations to a massive readership. Three more books would follow: The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (2 volumes, 1909), My Larger Education (1911), and The Man Farthest Down (1912).