Up from Slavery

Description: One of the foremost African American intellectual leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Booker T. Washington, an educator, author, and orator, is best known for his advocacy of black progress through education and entrepreneurship. The Norton Library edition of his seminal autobiography, Up from Slavery, features the text of the first (1901) edition, explanatory endnotes, and an introduction by Jarvis R. Givens that highlights Washington's life and work, discusses and contextualizes his strategies for racial uplift, and invites a nuanced reading of an author often dismissed for his "conservative" ideology.

Brief description: BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON was born into slavery in 1856 on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. After Emancipation, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he labored as a child in a salt furnace and coal mine. His hunger for formal education led him to enroll at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, founded in 1868 to train freedmen as teachers. At age twenty-five, he was appointed principal of the newly established Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In more than three decades as the school's director, he became the most influential African American educator and intellectual of his day. Unlike the younger W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that academic excellence and political activism would win full civil rights for black people, Washington advocated a nonconfrontational strategy of racial uplift and self-help. His gradualist approach informed the Tuskegee curriculum, which focused on preparing African Americans for trades and professions. An advisor to presidents and the recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth, Washington wrote several books, including Up from Slavery (1901), Working with the Hands (1904), and The Story of the Negro (1909).