Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
1901
The voice that changed America. Booker T. Washington rose from the ash heap of slavery to become the most powerful Black man in the nation, and this is his story in his own words. Born in Virginia in 1858, he knew nothing of freedom until the Civil War's end, when his mother led her family north toward something better. From coal mines to classrooms, from a hungry teenager sleeping outdoors at Hampton Institute to the founder of Tuskegee, Washington chronicled an improbable American journey. But this is not mere autobiography. It is a meditation on what it means to build something from nothing when everything and everyone is against you. Washington wrote in a time of Jim Crow and betrayal, when Reconstruction had failed and lynchings had begun. His strategy of accommodation, his insistence on industrial education and self-help, his famous Atlanta Compromise speech all come alive here, along with the quiet tensions and doubts a public man rarely shared. A century later, the book remains essential: not because Washington had all the answers, but because he faced the questions that still define what it means to be American.
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“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.””
— Booker T. Washington
“Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.””
— Booker T. Washington
“I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.””
— Booker T. Washington
“The happiest people are those who do the most for others. The most miserable are those who do the least.””
— Booker T. Washington
“Among a large class, there seemed to be a dependence upon the government for every conceivable thing. The members of this class had little ambition to create a position for themselves, but wanted the federal officials to create one for them. How many times I wished then and have often wished since, that by some power of magic, I might remove the great bulk of these people into the country districts and plant them upon the soil – upon the solid and never deceptive foundation of Mother Nature, where all nations and races that have ever succeeded have gotten their start – a start that at first may be slow and toilsome, but one that nevertheless is real.””
— Booker T. Washington
“The thing to do when one feels sure that he has said or done the right thing and is condemned, is to stand still and keep quiet. If he is right, time will show it.””
— Booker T. Washington
“I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done.””
— Booker T. Washington
“Great men cultivate love and only little men cherish a spirit of hatred; assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.””
— Booker T. Washington
“I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.””
— Booker T. Washington
