First published serially in the Christian newspaper “The Outlook” in 1900, “Up from Slavery” is the classic autobiography of one of the most controversial figures in American history, Booker T. Washington. “Up from Slavery”, recounts Washington’s rise from a Virginia tobacco farm slave to his long standing tenure as President of the famed Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. Booker T. Washington was instrumental in helping to establish schools specializing in vocational training for minorities in order to advance their position in society by obtaining marketable skills. Washington’s message was one of the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment for as he put it, “the individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.” While he has been described as an “accommodationist” and a “calculating realist”, his message of self-empowerment has been a dramatic force in the fight for racial equality and shall forever be remembered in the annals of American history.
