Booker T. Washington

Up from Slavery

An Autobiography (Complete and unabridged.)

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Booker T. Washington (April 18, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an African American educator, leader, author and orator and was an adviser to several US presidents. He was born into slavery on a plantation in Virginia, remembering "I cannot recall a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together. On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten to the children very much as dumb animals get theirs… a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there." He was nine when his family gained their emancipation and he describes the rejoicing and the apprehension as freed slaves entered a new life. His mother took the family to the free state of West Virginia. The only name he had known was "Booker," but at school, when first asked his name by the teacher, he coolly added "Washington" to be like the other children who had at least two names. This established him on a path of fitting into the white world. In the course of his life he established the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, helped found the National Negro Business League, now eclipsed by the NAACP, and advised several US presidents. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community and of the contemporary Black elite. He established a powerful political and financial network to advance the cause of African Americans through education and business known as the Tuskegee Machine. Up from Slavery chronicles Washington's life from slave to schoolmaster to statesman. It was a best seller when published and for many years thereafter. In it he writes "The temptations to enter political life were so alluring that I came very near yielding to them at one time, but I was kept from doing so by the feeling that I would be helping in a more substantial way … through a generous education of the hand, head, and heart." Up from Slavery along with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and du Bois's Souls of Black Folk are essential early African-American classics. This edition is complete and unabridged.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Benediction Classics
• Seitenzahl: 168
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juli 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 9mm
• Gewicht: 266g
• ISBN-13: 9781789431155
• ISBN-10: 1789431158
• Artikelnr.: 59787989

Autorenporträt

American educator, novelist, orator, and advisor to multiple presidents of the United States were Booker Taliaferro Washington. As the son of an African-American slave named Jane, Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856. His family relocated to West Virginia after emancipation. He completed his studies at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute while he was young (now Hampton University). Washington spent several years earning money in West Virginia by working in coal mines and salt furnaces. He traveled east to Hampton Institute, a Virginia institution founded to provide education for freedmen and their descendants, where he also took a job to help pay for his studies. Later, in 1878, he enrolled in Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. Washington had three marriages. He acknowledged the efforts made by all three of his wives at Tuskegee in his memoirs Up from Slavery. After receiving a diagnosis of Bright's illness, Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, passed away in 1915 at the age of 59. The illness was kidney inflammation, now known as nephritis. On November 14, 1915, soon after midnight, he boarded a train from New York to Tuskegee, where he passed away a few hours later. On November 17, 1915, he was buried, and close to 8,000 people showed up there.