The Story of My Life and Work (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Booker T. Washington and Marcus Bruce

In the summer of 1899, Booker T. Washington visited Europe to rest from his demanding schedule. Yet everywhere he turned, he encountered French and American scholars, politicians, businessmen, abolitionists, and average citizens eager to hear him tell the story of his life.  The former slave had earned a college degree, taught at the black freedman college Hampton Institute, gained a national reputation touring the country as an educational lecturer, founded a successful industrial college for African Americans, received an honorary degree from Harvard, and delivered a single speech that was heard across the country and which transformed Americans understanding of their racial problems.  This is his life story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411429284

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was a prominent figure in the African American community and a champion of higher education. He was born into slavery and obtained freedom shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation. As a child, he worked manual jobs to help support his family, but aspired to receive a formal education. He enrolled in Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia and thrived as a student. After graduating, Washington embarked on a career as a lecturer and leader of the Tuskegee Institute. He also worked as a political advisor to presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft.

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INTRODUCTION

IN THE SUMMER OF 1899, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON VISITED EUROPE FOR the first time and arrived in Paris exhausted. Bearing letters of introduction, he planned to meet with Americans abroad, see the wonders of Paris, and take a long rest from his demanding speaking schedule and fund-raising for Tuskegee Institute. Yet everywhere he turned—the American University Club, the American Chapel, the home of the American Ambassador to France—he encountered French and American scholars, politicians, businessmen, abolitionists, and average citizens eager to hear him speak and tell the story of his life. The former slave, now President of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, had achieved enormous success for a man of forty-five years old and consequently stories of his life, work, and skill as an orator had preceded him. Born into slavery, Washington had earned a college degree, taught at the black freedman college Hampton Institute, gained a national reputation touring the country as an educational lecturer, founded a successful industrial college for African Americans, received an honorary degree from Harvard, and delivered a single speech that was heard across the country and which transformed Americans’ understanding of their racial problems. Washington was, in the eyes of many, not only the representative of the Negro people, but the best example of what an African American might achieve.

Curious about and fascinated with Washington’s life, the French were anxious to hear how he had overcome the obstacles and challenges faced by other freed men and women. How had he endured slavery? Where had he gained his ability and confidence as a public speaker? Who were the individuals that most influenced him? How did he account for his enormous success and rise as a leader? What gave him the idea of founding a college for African Americans? How could America best solve its racial problems? Yet the question most frequently asked of Washington was: when would he write the story of his life and his work at Tuskegee?

The Story of My Life and Work, published in 1900, just one year after his visit to Paris, was Washington’s response. The lesser known of Washington’s biographical writings, The Story of My Life and Work is often eclipsed by his second and better-known autobiography Up From Slavery, a slave narrative published in 1901 and often classified and discussed with other well-known works of the same genre such as Frederick Douglass’ Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Story of My Life and Work was something completely different and possessed features that distinguish it as the work of an extraordinary figure in American and African-American history. At the very least, it revealed Washington’s genius for publicizing himself and his work. At its best, it was the story of a man, the educational institution he founded, and the moral vision that shaped both.

By any set of standards, Booker T. Washington was an extraordinary figure in American history. His achievements were considerable, and his life defied the conventional expectations of nineteenth-century African Americans, especially ones who had been enslaved. Washington’s rise to prominence was so remarkable that it led one journalist to ask whether he was a new Negro, someone capable of accomplishments previously thought impossible for African Americans. Yet Washington was more than a curiosity and his success at overcoming the obstacles in his life found wide appeal and approval among the American public. For the many who listened to Washington speak and later read his writings, the story of Washington’s life espoused and put into practice a set of values that most Americans embraced: hard work, discipline, industry, self-reliance, and boundless optimism. What amazed and impressed so many people was how the application of such values had allowed one who had begun life with so little to achieve so much.

Born a slave in Hale’s Ford in Franklin County, Virginia, on April 5, 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was the son of an enslaved African-American woman named Jane and a white American man whose identity was never known. Washington spent the first seven years of his life as a slave and later recalled working, even as a child, on the plantation of James Burroughs. His most vivid childhood memory was the day he and other slaves were gathered together and read the Emancipation Proclamation, a document granting freedom to four million enslaved African Americans. The moment would mark a major turning point in Washington’s life and the beginning of his efforts to define the shape and the substance of his life. The meaning, exercise, and application of freedom would become his life work.

At the age of nine, Washington moved with his mother, brother, and sister to Malden in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where the family resettled with his stepfather, Washington Ferguson. Given the extreme poverty of the family, Washington began working, alternately, in the local salt furnaces and coal mines. During this period Washington also worked for four year as the house servant of Mrs. Viola Knapp Ruffner, a New England woman who set high standards of order, cleanliness, and truth for her domestic workers. She instilled in Washington values that served him well in the years to come and formed the core of his moral philosophy of personal hygiene, self-reliance, discipline, and industry. Eager to learn, Washington also began his formal education during this period, attending a local school for African Americans whenever he could free himself from work. Hard work, a passion for learning, and a sense of mission—features of Washington’s early life—would be central to the message Washington delivered to audiences for the remainder of his life and career.

In 1872, Washington set his sights on attending Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a school created during Reconstruction (1863-1877) to provide technical and industrial training to formerly enslaved African Americans and prepare them to become teachers. Believing manual labor a morally transformative experience and a sign of character, Hampton also provided opportunities for students to pay for their education by working on the campus, a fact confirmed by Washington, who upon his arrival at Hampton, gained admission by meticulously sweeping and cleaning a room. During his three years of study at Hampton Institute, Washington found a mentor and friend in General Samuel Armstrong, a former Union Army officer, Freedman Bureau administrator, and the founder of Hampton Institute, who emphasized educating the whole person (the head, the heart, and the hands) and cultivated a strenuous work ethic in his students. A devout Christian, General Armstrong believed the moral character forged through hard work at Hampton was more beneficial than intellectual acumen and would sustain graduates throughout their lives. In speeches and his autobiographies, Washington would forever extol the virtues and dignity of hard work he had learned at Hampton under Armstrong’s tutelage. He also embraced Armstrong’s view that economic opportunities, rather than political solutions, would improve the status of African Americans in American society.

Graduating with honors from Hampton, Washington attended Wayland Seminary, a theological school for ministers, for one year and then began teaching freedmen in his hometown of Malden, Virginia. Within two years, General Armstrong called Washington back to Hampton to work as a principal and a teacher in the Hampton Institute night-school program. In 1881, a recommendation from General Armstrong led to Washington’s next position as the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Agricultural Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. The founder and eventually president of the educational institution for the first thirty-six years of its existence, Washington would use an initial $2,000 educational grant from the state of Alabama to transform Tuskegee from a normal school for colored youth into the leading black industrial college in the United States.

In the years following the founding of Tuskegee, Washington would keep a physically demanding schedule, putting his philosophy of self-help and hard work into action, supervising the day-to-day operations of the school, delivering speeches in both the North and South, and soliciting funds from wealthy Northern donors to provide scholarships for Tuskegee students, the building of new classrooms and dormitories (all constructed by students), and the purchase of land to accommodate the ever-expanding campus and growing institution.

In 1895, Washington delivered his most famous speech before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. Encouraging African Americans to place economic opportunities before civil and political rights, Washington won the praise and financial support of Northern businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Julius Rosenwald and found himself thrust into the national spotlight as the new representative of African Americans.

Between 1890 and 1915, Tuskegee, through Washington’s efforts, became the premiere industrial institute in the United States, standing at the head of a vast network of organizations, newspapers, governmental agencies, and educational institutions sometimes referred to euphemistically as the Tuskegee Machine. Washington, in turn, became a speaker in demand, a respected educator, the recognized representative of African Americans, and an advisor on racial matters to at least four American presidents—Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. Capitalizing on his national and international reputation, Washington traveled to Europe twice, created a special government-sponsored Negro exhibit for the Paris Exposition of 1900, supported the first Pan African Congress in London, England, and sent advisors to Africa to instruct colonial powers on the practical benefits of industrial education. Washington even led the way to integrating students from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds at Tuskegee, providing admissions to African American, American Indians, and Cubans.

In addition to The Story of My Life and Work, Washington, with the help of writers’ assistants, published numerous articles and five other books: Up from Slavery (1901), Tuskegee and Its People (1905), The Life of Frederick Douglass (1907), The Story of the Negro (1909), and My Larger Education (1911). Married three times, Washington was predeceased by his first two wives and survived by his third wife and widow, Margaret James Murray Washington, and his three children. Washington died on November 14, 1915, on the campus of Tuskegee Institute.

At first glance, The Story of My Life and Work appears a motley collection of material. Part autobiography, anthology of speeches, testimonials, letters of appreciation, news articles, treatise on self reliance, apology for industrial education, travelogue, brochure for Tuskegee Institute, and the surprising insights of a former slave, the work is a treasure trove of material drawn from the life of a successful man. Furthermore, The Story of My Life and Work is an American success story told from the perspective of a formerly enslaved African American. Readers witness Washington literally composing his life, one chapter, one speech, one testimonial, one newspaper clipping, one hard-won lesson at a time and reflecting on the significance of his life and work for its time and circumstances. In many ways The Story of My Life and Work reads like the popular success stories of nineteenth-century America, a rags-to-riches saga, replete with insights on personal hygiene, character, and the meaning of life. Washington is the dedicated Horatio Alger, the practical-minded Benjamin Franklin and the self-reliant Ralph Waldo Emerson all rolled into one. Yet a review of the historical context and contents of The Story of My Life and Work reveals still something more.

When Washington delivered his now famous Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895, he stepped into the leadership vacuum left by the death of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the former slave, abolitionist, orator, author, reformer, and perhaps the nation’s greatest nineteenth-century African-American leader. Washington’s emergence also came at a time when Americans were still grappling with the aftermath of the American Civil War and the failure of the social, economic, and political programs created during Reconstruction to address the welfare and future of more than four million formerly enslaved African Americans. Washington, a former slave freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, a graduate of an institution (Hampton) created by the Freedman’s Bureau, a spellbind ing orator, and a consummate diplomat in regards to racial matters, appeared the ideal candidate and was, according to his mentor General Armstrong, the Moses who would lead African Americans and the country through its racial problems.

Washington’s speech is also significant for its historic compromise. His now famous metaphor for the social separation of black and white Americans (in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual) foreshadowed the legalization of segregation, the separate but equal doctrine, in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson decision. The speech earned Washington the rather dubious title of the Great Compromiser because of his willingness to accommodate the prejudices, humiliations, and injustices of social segregation and political disen franchisement in exchange for economic opportunities. The letters and newspaper articles on voting rights and lynching included within this volume contradict this image and reveal a more outspoken and politically progressive Washington absent from the Atlanta Address and more often than not silent in his later writings.

The speech, though widely cheered and praised by many, also had its critics and a formidable opposition to Washington’ views emerged among prominent African Americans, leading to one of the great debates within the African-American community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is no mention of the debate in The Story of My Life and Work, both Washington’s speech and book itself developed an approach to racial matters that angered many African Americans.

Foremost among Washington’s critics was W. E. B. Du Bois, an American author, scholar, and political activist. Though Washington and Du Bois were both men of African descent, the differences between the two men could not have been greater. Washington had been born a slave, Du Bois a free man. Washington was born before the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Du Bois was born at the beginning of Reconstruction. Washington claimed the South as his home, Du Bois the North and the heart of New England. Washington had been educated at Hampton Institute, Du Bois boasted multiple degrees from Fisk University, Harvard University, and Heidelberg University in Germany and was the first African American to received a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Both men agreed on the importance of educating African Americans, yet they disagreed on how to best educate them and whether that education would lead to full citizenship rights. Washington believed an industrial education would provide African Americans with marketable skills and thus prepare them for economic opportunities in the marketplace. Once African Americans had established themselves through hard work, discipline, and industry, Washington believed political and civil rights would follow.

Du Bois believed a liberal-arts education, in which abstract thought and reflection were cultivated, was equally as, if not more, important than an industrial education. He also believed that the leadership for African Americans would come from this group of college-educated men and women, a group he referred to as the talented tenth. Who, Du Bois argued, would teach the students at Tuskegee and other educational institutions of higher learning the practical knowledge necessary for the variety of crafts they would learn, if not teachers trained in liberal-arts colleges and universities? Who, if not the liberally educated African-American elite within the black community, would denounce the pernicious and unjust treatment of African Americans denied their inalienable citizenship rights? Furthermore, Du Bois believed civil and political rights should remain a primary and not a secondary goal—second to the pursuit of economic opportunities and advancement. In 1909, Du Bois’ opposition to Washington’s leadership would eventually lead to the creation of a new organization, the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), to offer a different perspective and challenge Washington’s leadership and the dominance of the infamous Tuskegee machine.

The Story of My Life and Work also chronicles the founding of Tuskegee and reveals the extent to which Washington’s life and the rise of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute were inseparable. Tuskegee was the very incarnation and visible sign of Washington’s philosophy of self-help and hard work. An educational institution founded by a former slave and dedicated to educating free blacks in the tools and resources necessary for full participation in American society was also a success story like no other. There were other exceptional black colleges and universities educating free blacks during the period of Tuskegee’s rise (Fisk University, Atlanta University, Howard University, and Hampton were just a few examples) but none could match the powerful narrative story of Tuskegee’s founding president nor the annual confirmation and materialization of his philosophy in new buildings, students, and financial support.

Beginning with a state grant of $2,000, a small parcel of land, one other teacher, and eight students, Washington, by the time of his death in 1915, would leave an institution with an endowment of $2 million, 2,500 acres of land, 52 buildings, 185 faculty, 1527 students, and a board of trustees comprised of wealthy northern businessmen and white philanthropists. In addition to an educational program that provided training for agriculture, mechanics, nursing, music, and the trades, Washington organized annual conferences such as the Tuskegee Negro Conference (1892)—to put the brains into industry—and the National Negro Business League (1901) to promote better organization and support among African-American businessmen.

Yet the financial and material achievements of Tuskegee were only part of its success. Writing in The Story of My Life and Work, Washington emphasizes the hard work and struggle that had been necessary for the building of an educational institution like Tuskegee. As I look back now over our struggle, I am glad that we had it. I am glad that we endured all those discomforts and inconveniences. I am glad that our students had to dig out the place for their kitchen and dining room. I am glad that our first boarding place was in that dismal, ill-lighted, and damp basement. Had we started in a fine, attractive, convenient room, I fear we would have ‘lost our heads’ and become ‘stuck up.’ It means a great deal, I think to build on a foundation which one had made for himself.

Finally, Washington, and one might argue his readers, drew larger economic, social, and political implications from his personal story and Tuskegee’s success. Washington firmly and passionately believed that economic opportunity, advancement, and stability were the best means by which African Americans could gain full access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. If hard work and the pursuit of economic independence led to success and acclaim for Washington, why not for every American seeking to become a full and contributing member of American life and society? If Washington’s philosophy of self-help and reliance was an effective and successful response to the challenges faced by African Americans during and after the failure of Reconstruction, then one would assume his educational program (realized in Tuskegee) and attitudes toward politics and civil rights must be the best approach to the racial problems confronting the nation.

Washington offered a new vision of America to Americans frustrated by the failures and abuses associated with efforts to address the legacy of Reconstruction. Washington and Tuskegee showed how to achieve success in addressing a major social problem where others had failed. And it is in this regard that he demonstrates a form of American pragmatism, putting ideas to practical use to address social and political problems. In The Story of My Life and Work, Washington holds up for praise the values, beliefs, and ideas that most Americans thought essential for life and success in America. Emphasizing pervasive ideas regarding the importance of personal hygiene, hard work, discipline, trustworthiness, and industry, Washington won the hearts and minds of his audience and the reading public. In many ways, Washington’s appeal was a precursor of the middle-class American Dream and his message of building moral character and cultivating socially acceptable behavior among the uneducated, poor, and direction-less freedmen was a message both black and white Americans were eager to hear.

One month after publishing The Story of My Life and Work in 1900, Washington sent the American Negro Exhibit—a collection of books, photographs, sociological studies, and displays of black colleges and universities designed to show the progress of African Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation—to the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Among the items included within the Exhibit was an excerpt from The Story of My Life and Work, Washington’s famous Atlanta Address. Once the French Exposition jury had reviewed the other exhibits in the Palace of Social Economy, where Washington’s exhibit was housed, they awarded the American Negro Exhibit the grand prize for its extraordinary work and Washington a gold medal for his achievements as an educator. In their words, Booker T. Washington had shown what one man could achieve.

Marcus Bruce is Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He teaches in the African American and American Cultural Studies Programs and is the author of Henry Ossawa Tanner: A Spiritual Autobiography.

CHAPTER ONE

BIRTH AND EARLY CHILDHOOD

MANY REQUESTS HAVE BEEN MADE OF ME TO WRITE SOMETHING OF THE story of my life. Until recently I have never given much consideration to these requests, for the reason that I have never thought that I had done enough in the world to warrant anything in the way of an autobiography; and I hope that my life work, by reason of my present age, lies more in the future than in the past. My daughter, Portia, said to me, not long ago: Papa, do you know that you have never told me much about your early life, and your children want to know more about you. Then it came upon me as never before that I ought to put something about my life in writing for the sake of my family, if for no other reason.

I will not trouble those who read these lines with any lengthy historical research concerning my ancestry, for I know nothing of my ancestry beyond my mother. My mother was a slave on a plantation near Hale’s Ford, in Franklin County, Virginia, and she was, as I now remember it, the cook for her owners as well as for a large part of the slaves on the plantation. The first time that I got a knowledge of the fact that my mother and I were slaves was by being awakened by my mother early one morning, while sleeping in a bed of rags, on the clay floor of our little cabin. She was kneeling over me, fervently praying, as was her custom to do, that some day she and her children might be free. The name of my mother was Jane. She, to me, will always remain the noblest embodiment of womanhood with which I have come in contact. She was wholly ignorant, as far as books were concerned, and, I presume, never had a book in her hands for two minutes at a time. But the lessons in virtue and thrift which she instilled into me during the short period of my life that she lived will never leave me. Some people blame the Negro for not being more honest, as judged by the Anglo-Saxon’s standard of honesty; but I can recall many times when, after all was dark and still, in the late hours of the night, when her children had been without sufficient food during the day, my mother would awaken us, and we would find that she had gotten from somewhere something in the way of eggs or chickens and cooked the food during the night for us. These eggs and chickens were gotten without my master’s permission or knowledge. Perhaps, by some code of ethics, this would be classed as stealing, but deep down in my heart I can never decide that my mother, under such circumstances, was guilty of theft. Had she acted thus as a free woman she would have been a thief, but not so, in my opinion, as a slave. After our freedom no one was stricter than my mother in teaching and observing the highest rules of integrity.

Who my father was, or is, I have never been able to learn with any degree of certainty. I only know that he was a white man.

As nearly as I can get at the facts, I was born in the year 1858 or 1859. At the time I came into the world no careful registry of births of people of my complexion was kept. My birthplace was near Hale’s Ford, in Franklin County, Virginia. It was about as near to Nowhere as any locality gets to be, so far as I can learn. Hale’s Ford, I think, was a town with one house and a post office, and my birthplace was on a large plantation several miles distant from it.

I remember very distinctly the appearance of the cabin in which I was born and lived until freedom came. It was a small log cabin about 12×16 feet, and without windows. There was no floor, except one of dirt. There was a large opening in the center of the floor, where sweet potatoes were kept for my master’s family during the winter. In this cabin my mother did the cooking, the greater part of the time, for my master’s family. Our bed, or pallet, as we called it, was made every night on the dirt floor. Our bed clothing consisted of a few rags gathered here and there.

One thing I remember more vividly than any other in connection with the days when I was a slave was my dress, or, rather, my lack of dress.

The years when the war¹ was in progress between the states were especially trying to the slaves, so far as clothing was concerned. The Southern white people found it extremely hard to get clothing for themselves during that war, and, of course, the slaves underwent no little suffering in this respect. The only garment that I remember receiving from my owners during the war was a tow shirt. When I did not wear this shirt I was positively without any garment. In Virginia, the tow shirt was quite an institution during slavery. This shirt was made of the refuse flax that grew in that part of Virginia, and it was a veritable instrument of torture. It was stiff and coarse. Until it had been worn for about six weeks it made one feel as if a thousand needle points were pricking his flesh. I suppose I was about six years old when I was given one of these shirts to wear. After repeated trials the torture was more than my childish flesh could endure and I gave it up in despair. To this day the sight of a new shirt revives the recollection of the tortures of my first new shirt. In the midst of my despair, in connection with this garment, my brother John, who was about two years older than I, did me a kindness which I shall never forget. He volunteered to wear my new shirt for me until it was broken in. After he had worn it for several weeks I ventured to wear it myself, but not without pain.

Mrs. Booker T. Washington

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Booker T. Washingon I, II, and III

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Soon after my shirt experience, when the winter had grown quite cold, I received my first pair of shoes. These shoes had wooden bottoms, and the tops consisted of a coarse kind of leather. I have never felt so proud since of a pair of shoes.

As soon as I was old enough I performed what, to me, was important service, in holding the horses, and riding behind the white women of the household on their long horseback rides, which were very common in those days. At one time, while holding the horses and assisting quite a party of visiting ladies to mount their horses, I remember that, just before the visitors rode away, a tempting plate of ginger cakes was brought out and handed around to the visitors. This, I think, was the first time that I had ever seen any ginger cakes, and a very deep impression was made upon my childish mind. I remember I said to myself that if I ever could get to the point where I could eat ginger cakes as I saw those ladies eating them, the height of my ambition would be reached.

When I grew to be still larger and stronger the duty of going to the mill was intrusted to me; that is, a large sack containing three or four bushels of corn was thrown across the back of a horse and I would ride away to the mill, which was often three or four miles distant, wait at the mill until the corn was turned into meal, and then bring it home. More than once, while performing this service, the corn or meal got unevenly balanced on the back of the horse and fell off into the road, carrying me with it. This left me in a very awkward and unfortunate position. I, of course, was unable, with my small strength, to lift the corn or meal upon the horse’s back, and therefore would have to wait, often for hours, until someone happened to be passing along the road strong enough to replace the burden for me.

My owner’s name was Jones Burroughs, and I am quite sure he was above the average in the treatment of his slaves. That is, except in a few cases, they were not cruelly whipped. Although I was born a slave, I was too young to experience much of its hardships. The thing in connection with slavery that has left the deepest impression on me was the instance of seeing a grown man, my uncle, tied to a tree early one morning, stripped naked, and someone whipping him with a cowhide. As each blow touched his back the cry, Pray, master! Pray, master! came from his lips, and made an impression upon my boyish heart that I shall carry with me to my grave.

When I was still quite a child, I could hear the slaves in our quarters whispering in subdued tones that something unusual—the war—was about to take place, and that it meant their freedom. These whispered conferences continued, especially at night, until the war actually began.

While there was not a single slave on our plantation that could read a line, in some way we were kept informed of the progress of the war almost as accurately as the most intelligent person. The grapevine telegraph was in constant use. When Lee surrendered, all of the plantation people knew it, although all of them acted as if they were in ignorance of the fact that anything unusual had taken place.

Early one morning, just after the close of the war, word was sent around to the slave cabins that all the slaves must go to the big house, the master’s house; and in company with my mother and a large number of other slaves, including my sister Amanda and brother John, I went to the big house, and stood by the side of my mother, and listened to the reading of some papers and a little speech made by the man who read the papers. This was the first

Reviews for The Story of My Life and Work (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

[histreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I expected this to be a re-hash of Up From Slavery, but was glad to see it was more than an addendum to, what turns out to be, an slightly abridged memoirs. This book is a greatly expounded upon version of his first book but continues where Up From Slavery left off. A truly humble man, he did not seem to be stifling an urge to be self-congratulatory; rather, he gives all the accolades to his students and those who helped increase the size of the Institute he established. Similarly, he is in awe of the audience of his speech at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, he is excited about his performance but applauds the acceptance he garnered from those in attendance.Booker T. Washington is maligned by many who tend to be more militaristic, but his story proves one need not be aggressive and confrontational to advance a groups betterment.