Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born enslaved in Virginia, worked in a salt furnace and a coal mine, walked to Hampton Institute, and in 1881 founded Tuskegee in Alabama, building it from a shanty into the leading Black institution in the South. The Atlanta address of 1895, accepting segregation in exchange for economic opportunity, made him the most powerful Black American of his time and Du Bois’s chief antagonist. The Selected Speeches the lists assign include it; Up from Slavery is the autobiography. He dined at the White House with Roosevelt and worked quietly against the Jim Crow laws he publicly accepted.