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Booker T. Washington, Founder, Educator, Adviser… (1856)
Somewhere in Hale’s Ford, Virginia, on April 5, 1856, in a “slave hut…”
Booker T. Washington – the future African-American educator, founder, and adviser to two Presidents of the United States – was born.
The sting of poverty made going to school challenging for Booker, who, at the age of nine, began working at a salt furnace where brine was turned into commercial-grade salt.
‘Booker seized any opportunity to learn to read and write and began what he called his “book knowledge” right in that salt-furnace. Since each salt-packer had to mark his barrels with a certain number, Booker learned to recognize the number put on his barrels: “18.”’
‘He did not yet know other figures, but he had cleverly found a method for beginning to decipher them. It was a compulsion. “I had an intense longing to learn to read,” he wrote. “I determined, when quite a small child, that if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers.”’¹
His zest for personal and community advancement led Booker T. Washington to these accomplishments:
- Beginning in 1881, as its first president, until his death in 1915, he helped develop the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute from ‘”an institution with two small converted buildings, no equipment, and very little money,” to “100 well-equipped buildings, some 1,500 students, a faculty of nearly 200 teaching 38 trades and professions, and an endowment of approximately $2 million.”‘²
Over the years, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial cycled through name changes and is now Tuskegee University.
- On August 23, 1900, he founded the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in Boston, Massachusetts, the nation’s first and oldest business organization. The NNBL existed 12 years before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Inc., and was formally incorporated in 1901 in New York City.
While the organization is still in existence, it is now called the National Business League (NBL.)
- From 1901 to 1913, Booker T. advised U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.³
Related:
- Video || The George Washington Carver Story | The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation [3m 31s]
- “An Autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work,” by Booker T. Washington
- Booker T. Washington (National Park Service)
- Booker T. Washington Delivers the 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech
- National Negro Business League | Making Black America
- National Business League
- Tuskegee University
- The Past Is Never Past: Slave Labor in the West Virginia Salt Works
- “False Black Power” by Jason L. Riley
References:
- Booker T. Washington, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University
- Booker T. Washington, Wikipedia
- National Negro Business League, Wikipedia
- The Past Is Never Past: Slave Labor in the West Virginia Salt Works, The Atlantic
- Tuskegee University
Footnotes:
- Bill of Rights Institute, “To Accomplish the Most Good: Booker T. Washington’s Education – Handout A: Narrative,”
- Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Booker T. Washington,”
- study.com, “Which president did Booker T. Washington advise?”
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