Booker T. Washington: The Nine-Year-Old Who Walked Out of Slavery

He was born on a dirt floor. The cabin had no windows, a hole in the wall that served as a door, and a sweet potato hole in the center of the floor that was sometimes used as a sleeping place for the children. The year was eighteen fifty-six, and the place was a tobacco farm in Franklin County, Virginia, owned by a man named James Burroughs. The child's name was Booker. He would not have a last name in common use until he was free and needed one for school.

He was nine years old when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in eighteen sixty-five. He was freed not in a moment of ceremony but in a morning, when his mother gathered her children and told them what the words coming down from the big house meant. He described this moment decades later in his autobiography: great and overwhelming rejoicing, but with it uncertainty about what the freedom was for.

Washington walked approximately five hundred miles to Hampton, Virginia, to attend the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. He arrived with no money and was given a job sweeping a classroom as an entrance exam. He swept it three times and was admitted. He worked as a janitor to pay his tuition. He graduated in eighteen seventy-five and eventually founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama in eighteen eighty-one.

By nineteen hundred he was the most politically influential Black man in America. His Atlanta Compromise speech of eighteen ninety-five asked Black Americans to accept reduced political rights in exchange for economic opportunity, a position that W. E. B. Du Bois publicly attacked as accommodation and capitulation. The debate between Washington's pragmatic gradualism and Du Bois's insistence on full civil rights defines a fault line in Black American political thought that runs from that speech to the present.

The National Park Service preserves about two hundred acres of the Franklin County farm where his life began. The cabin where he was born no longer stands.