Up from Slavery

BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON was born into slavery in 1856 on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. After Emancipation, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he labored as a child in a salt furnace and coal mine. His hunger for formal education led him to enroll at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, founded in 1868 to train freedmen as teachers. At age twenty-five, he was appointed principal of the newly established Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In more than three decades as the school’s director, he became the most influential African American educator and intellectual of his day. Unlike the younger W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that academic excellence and political activism would win full civil rights for black people, Washington advocated a nonconfrontational strategy of racial uplift and self-help. His gradualist approach informed the Tuskegee curriculum, which focused on preparing African Americans for trades and professions. An advisor to presidents and the recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth, Washington wrote several books, including Up from Slavery (1901), Working with the Hands (1904), and The Story of the Negro (1909). JARVIS R. GIVENS is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty affiliate in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. In partnership with Imani Perry of Princeton University, he created The Black Teacher Archive, a digital humanities project focused on preserving the political and intellectual legacy of black schoolteachers before 1970. He is co-editor of We Dare Say Love: Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys (2018), and he is the author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021) and School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023).