Booker T. Washington..........................

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was born a slave, with a never-named white planter for a father.  Gaining his freedom after the Civil War, Washington worked as a manual laborer.  Sensing the importance of learning, he "left home and walked 500 miles to Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia. Along the way he took odd jobs to support himself. He convinced administrators to let him attend the school and took a job as a janitor to help pay his tuition."  Once finding school, he never really left.  In 1881 he was named the head of the newly created Tuskegee Institute. The intent at the time of Tuskegee's creation was  "not to produce farmers and tradesmen, but teachers of farming and trades."  Washington built well,  staying at Tuskegee until his death, leaving behind a highly successful place of learning. An educator, writer, fund-raiser, politician, and powerful speaker, Washington sought to advance the cause of African-Americans without antagonizing whites.  Difficult task to say the least.   More information about Washington is here and here.

The previous post Opening Paragraphs speaks to the vitriol that was heaped upon Washington for his having the nerve to dine with President Roosevelt.  If  you want to read real racism, go here.

A few quotes attributed to Booker T. Washington:

I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

There are two ways of exerting one's strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.

Character is power.

Opportunity is like a bald-headed man with only a patch of hair right in front. You have to grab that hair, grasp the opportunity while it's confronting you, else you'll be grasping a slick bald head.

The thing to do when one feels sure that he has said or done the right thing and is condemned, is to stand still and keep quiet. If he is right, time will show it.

I think I have learned that the best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else.

Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.

In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.