Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington recalled his childhood in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. He was born in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm which, despite its small size, he always referred to as a "plantation." His mother was a cook, his father a white man from a nearby farm. "The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin," he wrote, "were not very different from those of other slaves."

What was different was his desire to learn. He worked in menial tasks and took a job in a salt mine that began at 4:00 AM so that he could attend school.

"I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise,"

Later, as principal and guiding force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he founded in 1881, he became recognized as the nation's foremost black educator. You can read more about him here, here, here and here.

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