Booker T Washington Memoir Analysis

Education and the Evolution of a Race

Booker T. Washington was one of the foremost pioneers of African American civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through schooling, he evolved from a boy born into slavery into a prominent educator and activist that has made his mark on American history. He believed that the struggle for equal rights could be achieved through education, which would also allow for the advancement of the race as a whole. In his memoir, Up From Slavery, he describes his journey as a poor slave child who gives a great effort to receive an education that he wholeheartedly strived for, to becoming an educator and activist himself. As shown by the his own personal upbringing, the mentoring of Native Americans, as well as his Atlanta exposition, Washington found education to be essential to the progress of not only a race, but as the nation as a whole.

To begin with, his own upbringing and journey to seek education as a young man represented what he hoped to achieve as a race entirely. From a very, very young age, he was interested in learning how to read. Washington explains that as a child, "..if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers", (Washington, 13). This led to a stronger desire to learn as Booker grew older, pushing him to seek schooling of a high level. He attempted to balance public school, work, and later on, night class in order to enrich his life as a young man. During his teenage years, he got word of the "Hampton Institute," a school established for African Americans. He knew his destiny was to reach this place, explaining, " I was on fire with one ambition, and that was to go to Hampton," (Washington, 22). To summarize, Washington's journey to the institute, as well as his time spent there, was not easy. His journey there was met with both poverty and racism that followed him his whole life. Once there, he worked very...