Booker T. Washington
Storyboard Text
- Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the USA. He preached a philosophy of self-help & racial solidarity. Washington urged black people in the US to accept discrimination for the time being and concentrate on raising themselves to a higher position through hard work and material prosperity. Booker T. Washington was born on April 5 1856 in Virginia, USA.
- Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. His base was the Tuskegee Institute, later a historically black college in Alabama at which he served as principal. In 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the "Atlanta compromise", which brought him national fame.
- In 1856, Washington was born into slavery in Virginia as the son of Jane, an African-American slave. After emancipation, she moved the family to West Virginia to join her husband Washington Ferguson. West Virginia had seceded from Virginia and joined the Union as a free state during the Civil War.
- As a young man, Booker T. Washington worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (a historically black college, now Hampton University) and attended college at Wayland Seminary (now Virginia Union University).
- Washington worked in salt furnaces and coal mines in West Virginia for several years to earn money. He made his way east to Hampton Institute, a school established in Virginia to educate freedmen and their descendants, where he also worked to pay for his studies. He later attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. in 1878.
- Washington's health was deteriorating rapidly in 1915; he collapsed in New York City and was diagnosed by two different doctors as having Bright's disease, an inflammation of the kidneys, today called nephritis. Told he had only a few days left to live, Washington expressed a desire to die at Tuskegee. He boarded a train and arrived in Tuskegee shortly after midnight on November 14, 1915. He died a few hours later at the age of 59.
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