"The Future of the American Negro" from Booker T. Washington. African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to Republican presidents (1856-1915).

"The Negro in the South" from Booker T. Washington. African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to Republican presidents (1856-1915).

"Up from Slavery" from Booker T. Washington. African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to Republican presidents (1856-1915).

Up From Slavery - An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington - The details of Mr. Washington's early life, as frankly set down in "Up from Slavery," do not give quite a whole view of his education. He had the training that a coloured youth receives at Hampton, which, indeed, the autobiography does explain. But the reader does not get his intellectual pedigree, for Mr. Washington himself, perhaps, does not as clearly understand it as another man might. The truth is he had a training during the most impressionable period of his life that was very extraordinary, such a training as few men of his...

We are now, I think, far enough removed from the period of slavery to be able to study the influence of that institution objectively rather than subjectively. Surely if any Negro who was a part of the institution itself can do so, the remaining portion of the American people ought to be able to do so, whether they live at the North or at the South.

In this volume I shall not attempt to give the origin and history of the Negro race either in Africa or in America. My attempt is to deal only with conditions that now exist and bear a relation to the Negro in America and that are likely to exist in the future. In discussing the Negro, it is always to be borne in mind that, unlike all the other inhabitants of America, he came here without his own consent; in fact, was compelled to leave his own country and become a part of another through physical force.

Mr. Washington, more than any other writer or lecturer, has solved the "race problem." The historical value of the book, and its uplifting influence give ''The Story Of My Life And Work'' a prominent place in modern literature. It is a volume for the family library along with the Life of Franklin, Emerson's Essays and the great autobiographies. There is no greaterstimulus for self-help, for Mr. Washington forged his way to the front by his own efforts

In reprinting these orations the editor has endeavored to present them here as nearly as possible in their original form. No effort has been made to improve the English. Published in this form, then, these orations will be of value not only to persons studying the development of the Negro in his use of a modern idiom but also in the study of the history of the race. It is in this spirit that these messages are again given to the public.

Up From Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of Booker T. Washington detailing his personal ethnic and national experiences in working to rise from the position of a slave during the Civil War in the historical United States, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at Hampton University, to his work establishing vocational schools, most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. Up From Slavery is a must read memoir.