Booker T. Washington has been regarded as the leading figure in African American life, and as the man who brought his people from slavery to unfettered economic, political, and social involvement in the American mainstream. He has also been strongly criticized for advancing the cause of racial accommodation when the political agenda dictated the development of an independent black standpoint in all areas of the industrial structure. This agenda went far beyond educational reform and agrarian participation. Character Building first appeared in 1902. While enormous changes have occurred in all...

Character Building: Being Addresses Delivered on Sunday Evenings To The Students of Tuskegee Institute

THE chance or destiny which brought to this land of ours, and placed in the midst of the most progressive and the most enlightened race that Christian civilization has produced, some three or four millions of primitive black people from Africa and their descendants, has created one of the most interesting and difficult social problems which any modern people has had to face. The effort to solve this problem has put to a crucial test the fundamental principles of our political life and the most widely accepted tenets of our Christian faith. Frederick Douglass's career falls almost wholly...

IT HAS been my fortune to be associated all my life with a problem -- a hard, perplexing, but important problem. There was a time when I looked upon this fact as a great misfortune. It seemed to me a great hardship that I was born poor, and it seemed an even greater hardship that I should have been born a Negro. I did not like to admit, even to myself, that I felt this way about the matter, because it seemed to me an indication of weakness and cowardice for any man to complain about the condition he was born to. Later I came to the conclusion that it was not only weak and cowardly, but that...

Born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) educated himself tirelessly in the years after the American Civil War. In 1881, he was appointed head of the Tuskegee Institute, a teacher-training college for African Americans. As a writer, orator and fundraiser, he became one of the leading figures of the black community. Washington argued that the best way of bettering the social position of African Americans was through vocational education, which would make them indispensable and productive members of society. In this 1901 autobiography, he uses his life as an...