Booker T Washington1

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Booker Taliaferro Washington was the foremost black educator of the later 19th and early 20th centuries. He also had a major influence on the southern race relations and was the dominant figure in black public affairs from 1895 until his death in 1915. Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia back country, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. …

…colleges. His speaking tours and private persuasion tried to equalize public educational opportunities and to reduce racial violence. These efforts were generally unsuccessful, and the year of Washington's death marked the beginning of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. Washington's racial philosophy, pragmatically adjusted to the limiting conditions of his own era, but did not survive the change. Booker T. Washington was a man the greatly influenced that American society.