Up from Slavery: An Autobiography

About the book

Booker T. Washington recounts his childhood under slavery, his efforts to obtain an education, and the work of developing Tuskegee as an institution. The narrative places practical skills, labour, discipline, and financial support at the centre of educational advancement. Anecdotes about students, teachers, donors, and public speaking show how he understood the relationship between individual habits and collective possibility. Washington also uses the story of his life to present a position on racial progress in the United States, making autobiography a vehicle for public persuasion. Readers can attend both to the concrete difficulties of institution building and to the assumptions behind his chosen strategy. The book offers an influential account of work and education whose arguments gain further depth when placed beside other Black writers' responses.

• Education
• Institution building
• Racial advancement

Why read it

For a firsthand account of creating an educational institution and the public philosophy used to support it.

English text