Born April 5, 1856 (Franklin County, Virginia)

Died November 14, 1915 (Tuskegee, Alabama)

Educator

Activist

Writer

Booker T. Washington was the first national leader for millions of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. The founder of an all-black school in Alabama called the Tuskegee Institute, Washington urged the South's eight million freed slaves and their descendants to continue to farm and do manual labor. Through hard work, he believed, they would prosper and someday enjoy the same rights and privileges as white Americans. He cautioned blacks to avoid political and civil rights battles, but to work instead to become property owners and merchants, and to create their own thriving, self-sufficient communities.

As Washington recounted in his well-known autobiographies, Up from Slavery (1901) and The Story of My Life and Work (1901), he was born into slavery in 1856. He was not the property of a wealthy plantation owner...