Booker Taliaferro was born on 5th April 1856 in Franklin country. His father was an anonymous white man and his mother was a slave of one James Burrough. She was a peasant farmer in Virginia. His mother later married a slave called Washington Ferguson. Booker took the name of his new father after he entered school and became Booker T. Washington.

The family later moved to Malden in West Virginia after the civil war. Ferguson operated in the salt mines and Booker found employment as a salt-packer at the tender age of nine. Later he became a coal miner (1866-68) before moving to work as a houseboy for the wife of the owner of the mines, Lewis Ruffner,. She heartened Booker to carry on his education and in 1872 he got into Hampton Agricultural Institute.

The head of the institute was Samuel Armstrong, a very strong opponent of oppression and slavery who had been commander of African-American troops during the Civil War. He felt that it was of essence that the freed slaves receive a practical education. Armstrong was fascinated with Washington and organized for his fees to be catered for by a wealthy white man.

Armstrong grew into Washington’s mentor. Washington labelled Armstrong in his autobiography as a great rarest man he had ever been privileged to meet. Armstrong’s opinions of the development of character and morality and the essence of providing African-Americans with a good practical education had a lifelong effect on Washington’s own philosophy.

After advancing from the Hampton Agricultural Institute in 1875 Washington went back to Malden and found a job with a local home-grown school. He was employed by Samuel Armstrong after a while as a student at Wayland Seminary in 1878 to teach in a program for Native Americans.

Lewis Adams, a black political leader in Macon County, in 1880, approved to assist two white Democratic-party candidates, William Foster and Arthur Brooks, to win a local election in return for the construction of a Negro school in the locality. Both won and they then used their power to secure approval for the costruction of the Tuskegee Institute.

When Samuel Armstrong, principal the Hampton Agricultural Institute was asked to recommend a white teacher to take charge of this school, he suggested that it would be a noble idea to employ Booker T. Washington instead.

On the 4th July, 1888, the Tuskegee Negro School was opened. The school had been initially a shanty building maintained by the local church. Washington was able to borrow funds from the treasurer of the Hampton Agricultural Institute to acquire an uninhibited estate on the outskirts of Tuskegee and put up his own school.

The school educated academic subjects but lay emphasis on practical education that included shoemaking, printing, farming, carpentry, cabinetmaking and brickmaking. This enabled students to become involved in the erection of a new school. Students worked for long, arising at five in the morning and retiring at nine-thirty at night.

The school owned 540 acres of land by 1888, and had in excess of 400 students. Washington’s conservative management of the school made it tolerable to the white-controlled Macon County. He did not believe that blacks ought to campaign for the vote, and claimed that blacks needed to confirm their loyalty to the United States by working hard without protest before being granted their political rights.

The whites from the south, who had until that time been contrary to the education of African-Americans, supported Washington’s ideas because they saw them as means of encouraging them to accept their lower economic and social status. This made white businessmen to donate large amounts of funds to his school.

Washington became a national figure in September 1985 when his speech at the launch of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta was extensively reported by the country’s newspapers. His conservative views made him popular with white politicians who were ardent that he should become the new leader of the African-American population. To assist him in this President William McKinley paid a visit to the Tuskegee Institute and praised Washington’s accomplishments.

President Theodore Roosevelt requested Washington in 1901 to visit him in the White House. To southern whites, this was reaching too far.

Washington spent most of his time in classes, lecturing. His African-American critics opposed his way of arguing that it was the role of blacks to serve whites, and that those black leaders who wanted social equality were political extremists.

Washington helped establish the National Negro Business League in 1900. He served as the president and ensured that the organization lay emphasize on commercial issues and paid no attention to issues of African-American civil and political rights. To him, the opportunity to earn a living and acquire property was more essential than the right to vote.

He worked faithfully with Thomas Fortune, the owner of The New York Age, a newspaper. He frequently supplied Fortune with news and editorials favorable to himself. When the newspaper plunged into financial problems, Washington became one of its principal stockholders secretly.

His autobiography was first published in The Outlook magazine and in 1901 it was finally published as Up from Slavery. His critics put it that the views articulated in his books, articles and lectures were essentially the main views of the whites.

Some of his critics were notable people such as William Du Bois but still continued to be consulted by powerful white politicians and had a say in the African-American appointments made by Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) and William H. Taft (1909-13).

Booker Taliaferro Washington was termed as 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. Though he offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both northern charitable founders and southern leaders were already promoting, he became its chief black paradigm and spokesman.

At the same time the tried to translate his own particular success into black advancement through secret support of civil rights suits, sitting on the boards of Fisk and Howard universities, and aiming aid to these and other black colleges. His lecturing tours and private influence tried to equalize public educational openings and to reduce racism. The efforts were generally unsuccessful and his death marked the start of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. Washington’s racial ideas, pragmatically attuned to the limiting conditions of his own period, did not endure the change.

Washington was married three times. In his autobiography Up from Slavery, he credited all three of his wives for their assistances at Tuskegee. His first wife Fannie N. Smith was from Malden, West Virginia. He maintained ties there all his life. Washington and Smith were married in 1882 and had one child, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in May 1884.

Washington then wed Olivia Davidson in 1885. She was born in Virginia and studied at Hampton Institute and at Framingham in the Massachusetts State Normal School. She taught in Tennessee and Mississippi before going to Tuskegee to work as a teacher. Washington met Davidson at Tuskegee, where she was elevated to assistant principal. They had two sons, before she died in 1889.

Next, Washington married Margaret James Murray in 1893. She was from Mississippi. They had no children together, but she aided rear his children. Murray lived longer than Washington and died in 1925.

On 5th November 1915, Booker Taliaferro Washington was taken unwell to St. Luke’s Hospital, New York City, suffering from arteriosclerosis. He was cautioned that he did not have many days to live and decided to travel to Tuskegee where he passed away on 14th November. His funeral was held in the Tuskegee Institute Chapel and was attended by over 8000 people.

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