Up from Slavery: An Autobiography

Up from Slavery is the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, born a slave on a Virginia plantation and uncertain even of the year of his birth. He opens with the bare poverty of the slave cabin and the dirt floor, then describes the bewildering moment of emancipation, when freedom arrived alongside the burden of having nothing and knowing nothing of how to live on one's own.

As a boy in West Virginia he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines while hungering for an education, learning the alphabet at night and walking and begging his way to the Hampton Institute. There, given a recitation-room to clean as his entrance test, he swept and dusted it so thoroughly that he was admitted, and there he learned to love labour for its own sake and the self-reliance it brings.

Hampton and its founder, General Armstrong, gave Washington both a model and a creed: education joined to manual skill, cleanliness, and character. From Armstrong's example he drew the lesson that great men cultivate love while little men cherish hatred, and he resolved to let no man drag him down into hating in return.

The heart of the book is the founding of Tuskegee in 1881, begun in a leaky shanty and an old church with no land, no buildings, and almost no money. Washington and his teachers built the school literally with their students' hands, making bricks, raising crops, and constructing the buildings, on the conviction that a people advances fastest when it learns to produce what others need and must have.

The narrative builds to Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exposition address, his great public turning point, where he urged both races to cast down their buckets where they were, to begin with industry and friendship rather than agitation. The speech made him a national figure; the book closes with his travels, honors, and unwavering faith that usefulness, patience, and goodwill would secure his people's place.