BOOKER T. WASHINGTON is best remembered for helping Black Americans rise up from the economic slavery that held them down long after they were legally free citizens. Booker T. Washington was born in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm. His mother, a slave, was a cook, and his father a White man from a nearby farm. He went to school in Franklin County but could only carry books for one of James Burroughs's daughters. In April 1865, when the Emancipation Proclamation was read in front of the Burroughs home, Booker's family left to join his stepfather in Malden, West Virginia.

He began to attend school and after a few years, he was taken in as a houseboy by a wealthy towns-woman who encouraged his longing to learn. At age 16, he walked much of the 500 miles back to Virginia to enroll in a new school for Black students, Hampton Institute.

He became an instructor there and then, principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he founded in 1881, which led to him being recognized as the nation's foremost Black educator. A concept of self-reliance born of hard work was the cornerstone of Washington's social philosophy.

His critics charged that his conservative approach undermined the quest for racial equality. In part, his methods arose for his need for support from powerful Whites, some of them former slave owners. However,  he secretly funded antisegregationist activities. He never wavered in his belief in freedom: “From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery."

By the last years of his life, Washington had moved away from many of his accommodationist policies. Speaking out with a new frankness, Washington attacked racism. In 1915 he joined ranks with former critics to protest the stereotypical portrayal of Blacks in a new movie, “Birth of a Nation..”

Some months later he died at age 59. A man who overcame near-impossible odds himself, Booker T. Washington is best remembered for helping Black Americans rise up from the economic slavery that held them down long after they were legally free citizens.