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Booker T. Washington Summary

Book summary - Up From Slavery The book, Up From Slavery, written by Booker Taliaferro Washington, profoundly touched me when I read it. Washington accomplished many amazing obstacles throughout his life. He became perhaps the most prominent black leader of his time. Blacks could gain equality by improving their economic situation through education rather than by demanding equal rights that was termed the Atlanta Compromise. Washington’s life story was told during the mid to late 1800’s into the early 1900’s, in the time when the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation was one major event in history that forever changed our country. All slaves were free and had to go find a new place to live and a new place to work. When the slaves were first freed there was alot of hostile feelings from the whites towards the newly freed slaves. To blacks living within post- Reconstruction South, Washington offered industrial education as the means of escape from sharecropping and allowed blacks to become self-employed, while owning their own land, or small business. Booker over came the obstacles of the free black man by educating himself and other blacks to become “equal” to whites. Until the star

t of World War I African Americans had a difficult time. His speaking tours and private persuasion tried to equalize public educational opportunities and to reduce racial violence. There were many gains earned after the Civil War seemed lost by the time of World War I because racial violence and lynching reached an all time high. However, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL) were founded by blacks and whites during this time. Both of these major civil rights organizations make efforts on the part of blacks and their white allies to insure that the United States provides "freedom and justice to all". The year of Washington's death marked the beginning of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. He is known as one of the best civil rights leaders for the African American people in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Booker began his life as a slave for the Burroughs family. He was born in Franklin Co., Virginia around the year 1858 or 1859, he was not sure exactly when he was born because there was never any paper work kept on slaves. His mother was a slave and his father was a white man that he never knew. After the emancipation Booker’s family decided to move to Malden, West Virginia. The trip from Franklin county to Malden, West Virginia was the first he had ever taken. The trip took Booker’s family many days because all of them had to walk to whole way. They settled in a very small house with many other black and very poor white neighbors. His step-father soon found work for Booker and his brother John. They worked in the salt furnaces and coal mines. Booker did not want to work he wanted to go to school to learn. A school teacher, Mr. William Davis, came into his community. Booker was eager to attend the school but his step-father was not able to spare me from work, so could not attend it when it was first opened. Booker would go to work during the day and be taught by a teacher at night. This seemed to be a problem because the teacher his mother hired didn’t know much more then he. After working in the coal mine for some time, his m