Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery
"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" (BTW 586). The "Sage of Tuskegee," Booker T. Washington was born in slavery in 1856 in what is now West Virginia. He had reached the age of seven by the time of Emancipation (1863), and recalls in his autobiography Up From Slavery with characteristic lucidity and plaintive effect the joy that he witnessed among the adult slaves when word came that they were free. Booker T. Washington came of age during the period known as Reconstruction. This period immediately following the Civil War (1861-1864) in which the South slowly rebuilt its financial losses from the war, and African American slaves, free from the constraints of chattel slavery, were fleeing the North to find enfranchisement and escape the racial tension of the South. Aided by the Army and the Freedman's Bureau, a Republican coa...