Near the beginning of Up from Slavery, Washington builds a small “library” for himself while still a child, foreshadowing his development of the Tuskegee Institute (complete with the construction of an actual library):
Mrs. Ruffner always encouraged and sympathized with me in all my efforts to get an education. It was while living with her that I began to get together my first library. I secured a dry-goods box, knocked out one side of it, put some shelves in it, and began putting into it every kind of book that I could get my hands upon, and called it my “library.”
In this passage Washington hints that this will not be the only library he builds in his life (calling it his “first” library), foreshadowing the building of the large Tuskegee library to come. Unlike this first tiny “library” (which Washington puts in quotes to acknowledge its less-then-formal nature), the Tuskegee Library—funded by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie—will have “over 12,000 books, periodicals, etc.” by the time it is complete.
It is noteworthy that Washington does not bemoan the lackluster nature of his original library or complain about the fact that he had so little access to books or formal education as a child. He happily makes do with what he has access to, one of the tenets of his philosophy of racial progress (as seen in the "cast down your buckets where you are" portion of his Atlanta Exposition Address).
When sharing his opinions on the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, Washington alludes to people considered to be “carpetbaggers,” such as “ex-Governor Bullock,” defending them in the process:
Neither were all the class designated as carpetbaggers dishonourable men. Some of them, like ex-Governor Bullock, of Georgia, were men of high character and usefulness.
The “class designated as carpetbaggers” were primarily white men who moved from the North to the South after the Civil War in order to benefit from Reconstruction socially, financially, and/or politically. The phrase comes from the fact that many of the people moving to the South would carry their personal belongings in “carpet bags,” an affordable form of luggage made out of carpet that was popular at the time. The term was a derogatory one primarily employed by conservative white Southerners who resented Northerners moving to their territory and influencing their culture.
“Ex-Governer Bullock” is an allusion to Rufus Brown Bullock, a progressive white man from New York who moved to the South after the War and was elected the governor of Georgia from 1868 to 1871. He was eventually run out of the state by the Ku Klux Klan due to his support of political rights for Black Americans.
Washington’s description of Bullock as a man “of high character and usefulness” here, near the beginning of his autobiography, is also a subtle form of foreshadowing, as he will go on to meet Bullock later in the book. In fact, Bullock is one of the commissioners of Washington’s famous Atlanta Exposition Address and is on stage with Washington when he gives it. Like Washington, Bullock was a supporter of gradual racial progress.
