Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Washington, Booker T.
6 articles on Washington, Booker T.
Washington, Booker T.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 5631 Includes: Bibliography(b. 5 April 1856?; d. 14 November 1915),
scholar, educator. At the end of the nineteenth the century Booker T. Washington emerged as the most prominent African American in the eyes of most whites and a substantial majority of blacks. He achieved his status by creating a school for African Americans at Tuskegee, Alabama, and by voicing a strategy for African Americans to improve their political, social, and economic status in the United States. Washington's accomplishments, his vision for African American progress, and especially his leadership ultimately generated as much controversy and opposition as support. His opponents, especially within the black community, challenged his approach to race and racism in the United States. In spite of these difficulties, by 1895Washington had achieved remarkable ...
Read full articleWashington, Booker T.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 6227 Includes: Early Life and Education. | Tuskegee. | Growing Influence. | Criticism from Du Bois and Others. | Spheres of Influence. | Decline, Death, and Legacy. | Bibliography(b. 5 April 1856; d. 14 November 1915), educator and leader known as the “Wizard of Tuskegee.” Booker Taliaferro Washington's genius lay in his understanding of the politics of practicality and particularity. As a black leader in an always difficult and dangerous American South, Washington still managed to realize great personal fame and obtain results in education, agriculture, health, housing, and business for black and white Americans. He pushed for civil and human rights, but those unaware of his activities, past and present, have been prone to label him an Uncle Tom. Washington's main biographer, Louis R. Harlan, considers Washington an “accommodationist,” one who accepted the broad framework of segregation but nonetheless worked to improve the status of black Americans within that framework and also surreptitiously challenged Jim Crow laws. ...
Read full articleWashington, Booker Taliaferro
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1896 Includes: Discipline and Efficiency | Establishing Tuskegee | National Prominence | Stung by Criticism | Bibliography1856–1915
Prominent African American who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and urged blacks to accommodate to life in the white South and concentrate on economic self-advancement. Washington was born Booker Taliaferro, a slave, in rural Virginia on April 5, 1856. His mother, Jane, was the plantation's cook; his father was a white man whose identity he never knew. Washington worked as a servant in the plantation house until he was liberated by Union troops near the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). After the war, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where they joined Washington Ferguson, also a former slave, whom Jane had married during the war.To help support the family, Washington worked first in a salt furnace, then in a coal mine, and later as a ...
Read full articleWashington, Booker T.
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 4844 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(5 Apr. 1856?–14 Nov. 1915), educator and race leader, was born on the plantation of James Burroughs, near Hale's Ford in Franklin County, Virginia, the son of an unknown white father and Jane, a slave cook owned by Burroughs. Washington was never certain of the date of his birth and showed little interest in who his father might have been. His mother gave him his first and middle names, Booker Taliaferro; he took his last name in 1870 from his stepfather, Washington Ferguson, a slave whom his mother had married. In his autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), he recalled the poverty of his early years as a slave on Burroughs's plantation, but because emancipation came when he was around nine, he was spared the harsher experiences of the slave system. In 1865, at the end of the CivilTwo women ...
Read full articleWashington, Booker T.
Source: Oxford Companion to Black British History
Word Count: 389( 1856 – 1915 ). Advocate of black selfâimprovement through industrial education. Born in Virginia to a slave mother and unknown white father, he founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1888 . He made two visits to Britain, the first in early summer 1899 as part of a European vacation and speaking tour. He was impressed by technical and agricultural education in Britain, but shocked by social conditions in London's East End. During his visit he also gained greater insight into the effects of European rule in Africa, concluding that repatriation to Africa would not improve the lot of black Americans. His recollections of the trip also underline his conservatism, evident in an appreciation of British class deference and social order. ...
Read full articleWashington, Booker T.
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1470(1856–1915), educator, autobiographer, biographer, and race leader. Few public figures in African American life excite as much passion and misunderstanding as Booker Taliaferro Washington. Born a slave on a Virginia plantation in 1856, Washington rose to become the founder and driving force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington is such a compelling subject because he focuses our attention on issues of leadership and public visibility, the nature of work and how it impacts upon the quality of African American life, and the in ternecine struggles for power within the African American elite. In the late 1980s, many began to view Washington as a man of skewed racial allegiances, a figure for whom white approval was everything. This interpretation of his life, however, relies on Washington's public persona to substantiate its claims. What is very clear is that ...
Read full article