Booker T. Washington
Formerly enslaved American educator who led Tuskegee Institute and wrote the autobiography Up from Slavery Show bio
Bio
Booker T. Washington could not remember his enslaved family ever sitting down to a meal together. He gained his freedom at nine and began, painstakingly, to teach himself to read.
Washington passed his entrance exam at a Virginia school for freed people by cleaning a room. He became the first head of Tuskegee Institute, a new teachers' college in Alabama, at 25. Washington had his students build the campus themselves, from the bricks to the crops.
He won national fame with an 1895 speech in Atlanta that caught politicians' attention. Washington sat down to dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901.