BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856-1915)
This American educator, author, orator, and presidential adviser was born enslaved on a Virginia plantation five years before the start of the American Civil War. The illiterate boy taught himself to read and write around age 9 or 10, and worked hard--including in a coal mine--to pay for college. After graduation, just 25 years old, he was chosen to lead a new teacher's training college in Alabama, the Tuskegee Institute. He oversaw the purchase of land and the building of structures, the labor being performed by the students. He saw education as the solution to the oppression of American blacks, especially in the South. His emphasis was on practical trades: his students would not just learn to make buildings and to grow crops and farm animals, but to teach others to do the same.
(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons; CTTO)
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