“Political activity alone cannot make a man free. Back of the ballot, he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character.” 

These words were spoken by a man raised in slavery. Yet in this man’s philosophy lies the key to freedom. His name: Booker T. Washington.

Born in 1856 in Franklin County, Virginia, Booker Taliaferro Washington spent his earliest years as a slave. Of his father he knew nothing. “I do not even know his name,” wrote Washington in his Autobiography. “Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing.” Yet he harbored no grudges. “He was simply another unfortunate victim,” wrote Washington, “of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.”[1]

When emancipation came, it was like a plunge into cold water: refreshing but sobering. Washington sensed the implications of freedom even as a small boy. In his Autobiography he wrote: “The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great question with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved.”[2] Washington early on recognized that freedom means responsibility as well as privilege.

Soon after emancipation, Washington and his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where his stepfather worked in a salt furnace. Put to work beside his father, young Washington seemed destined for a life of drudgery. Yet he persuaded his parents to let him attend school before and after work. Following a regimen that would have killed someone with less determination, Washington seemed to run on adrenaline around the clock.

Washington soon outgrew the school at Malden. Heating of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where blacks could work their way through school, he set out at the age of sixteen with only a few dollars in his pocket. When he arrived, the teacher told him to sweep the room. Characteristically, he swept it three times and dusted it four. As he later said: “I had the feeling that in a large measure my future depended upon the impression I made upon the teacher in the cleaning of that room.”[3] In at least one aspect, it was a more accurate assessment than any Scholastic Aptitude Test or Graduate Record Examination: it revealed character. After the teacher inspected the room, she told Washington: “I guess you will do to enter this institution.”

While at Hampton, Washington came into contact with a truly great man, Samuel T. Armstrong. Armstrong, a Northern general, dedicated himself to rebuilding the South through education when the war was over. Of him Washington wrote: “One might have removed from Hampton all the buildings, classrooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Arm strong, and that alone would have been a liberal education. The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women. Instead of studying books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things.”[4] To pay his board, Washington worked as a janitor and a waiter. To fit himself for a trade, he studied masonry. So greatly did he impress the administration and trustees of Hampton that after graduation he was appointed as an instructor.

Meanwhile, at Tuskegee, Alabama, George Campbell, a white merchant, conceived the idea of a training school for blacks. When he wrote to Hampton for a suggestion for a principal, Booker T. Washington was recommended. Accepting the position, Washington arrived in Tuskegee only to find an old, worn-out field. The school itself was little more than a distant vision in Campbell’s mind. But Washington caught that vision, and set to work laying the groundwork for what would become one of the nation’s most unique schools.

Washington set up shop in a small church, sallying forth into the surrounding counties to look for prospective students. Eventually 30 students enrolled in Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Appropriately, the first term began on July 4, 1881. It was symbolic, for at Tuskegee poor blacks would get a chance to learn skills that would make them truly free—skills that would make them valuable members of the American economy. At Tuskegee, not only did every student study Western culture, every student had to work with his hands. “The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.”[5]

During Tuskegee’s formative years, Washington confronted deep-seated prejudice and misconceptions from both blacks and whites. Many whites felt that an educated Negro wouldn’t work, while many blacks protested against making manual labor a part of the Institute program. Washington attacked these views by teaching that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Private philanthropy made it possible for Washington to accept every student who came, regardless of whether he could pay. White citizens of Tuskegee made donations, as did poor blacks who lived in the area. As Washington’s fame spread, and Tuskegee’s along with it, some of the money from America’s great captains of industry found its way to Tuskegee. Railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington gave over $50,000, while Andrew Carnegie donated enough to build a library, and later, a $600,000 gift. In making the latter gift, Carnegie wrote of Washington, “To me he seems one of the foremost of living men because his work is unique.”[6]

The school was an unqualified success. As a pioneer of vocational education, Tuskegee paved the way for similar institutions for both blacks and whites. In 1908, Washington pointed out that “it was the Negro schools in large measure that pointed the way to the value of this kind of education.”[7] At each commencement, visitors were pleased and amazed to see the graduates go through their paces. “I have never seen a commencement like Tus-kegee’s before,” wrote Mary Church Terrell. “On the stage before our eyes students actually performed the work they had learned to do in school. They showed us how to build houses, how to paint them, how to estimate the cost of the necessary material and so on down the line.”[8]

Soon other talented blacks began to gather around Booker T. Washington, including George Washington Carver. Calling his laboratory at Tuskegee “God’s Little Workshop,” Carver reduced the South’s dependence on cotton, which depleted the soil, by finding over 300 uses for peanuts. Largely financed by the private sector, Carver’s research gave a great boost to American agriculture.