Booker T Washington Essay, Research Paper

Fred BoucherUS History March 1, 1991 Booker Taliaferro Washington Booker Taliaferro Washington was born April 5,1856 in James County VA. He was born in a slave hut. After the emancipation proclamation, he moved with his family to Malden W. Va. He never went to school when he was young because of poverty. His first job when he was nine was a hard labor job, he worked in a salt furnace and then in a coalmine. He decided that instead of working he was going to be school so he would have an education. He enrolled at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Va. He also got a job as a janitor at the school to help pay for his schooling. He graduated soon after and began to teach children and adults in Malden and then went and taught at Hampton.In 1881 Booker T Washington was selected to head the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He dedicated the rest of his life to the school. He strived to make blacks intellectuals and to break the race barrier between blacks and whites. Many of the people who attended the Institute were illiterate farm workers. Washington urged the hard working farms to abandon their work for some time to become educated and help society.

When Booker died November 14, 1915 in Tuskegee, Alabama his Institute Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute had one hundred well equipped buildings, 1500 students, two hundred teachers teaching 38 different trades and professions, and an endowment of $2,000,000. This is very amazing because 34 years prior there were only two buildings that were poorly equipped and the school had very little money.