Up From Slavery

Washington was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856 and was nine at emancipation. The memoir runs from the salt furnaces and coal mines of his childhood through his arrival at Hampton Institute — where he swept a classroom as his entrance exam — to the founding and building of Tuskegee, the school he ran for the rest of his life.

It is also the fullest statement of his programme: trades, property, thrift and demonstrated competence as the route to standing, with agitation for political rights deferred. That programme was disputed hard in his own lifetime, most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the argument over whether it was strategy or accommodation is still the main thing scholars read the book for.

Context: At Lexile 1320 the hardest of the Autobiography entries, and the only one by a formerly enslaved author.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Booker T. Washington — the author and founder of Tuskegee.
• Education — the institution-building that is the book’s second half.
• People Over Politics — Washington’s explicit wager, and the part of the book that was contested.