Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, on a plantation near Hale’s Ford. Upon emancipation in 1865, Washington’s mother moved their family to join her husband who had escaped from slavery. Washington, desiring an education, worked his way to enrollment at the Hampton Institute, a college for black Americans. With his formal education Washington took a position at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and developed a curriculum for vocational and technical education for black Americans. His promotion of physical labor, vocational education, and gradual racial uplift gained attention in the United States, and he eventually became one of the foremost conservative educational philosophers in America. Washington died in 1915 at the age of 59 of heart failure.