Up from Slavery

What It's About

Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his own life, from a childhood in slavery on a Virginia plantation to his years as principal of Tuskegee Institute. He describes emancipation, his family's move to a West Virginia mining town where he worked in a salt furnace and a coal mine as a boy, and his determined journey to Hampton Institute, where he worked as a janitor to pay his way. The heart of the book is the founding of Tuskegee in 1881, which began with a handful of students in a borrowed church and a shanty and grew into a school whose students built the campus themselves, brick by brick. Later chapters cover his fundraising among wealthy Northern donors, his celebrated address at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, and his travels abroad.

Key Concepts

Washington argues that practical training, steady work and economic independence were the surest foundations for Black progress after Reconstruction, and that dignity attaches to useful labour of any kind. His Atlanta address, with its image of "casting down your bucket where you are", urged cooperation between the races in the South and became known as the "Atlanta Compromise". It is also the book's most debated idea. Critics, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois, argued that it accepted segregation and disenfranchisement in exchange for economic opportunity, and later readers have noted how far the book softens the racial violence of the period in favour of an optimistic, conciliatory tone. Historians have also shown that Washington privately funded legal challenges to segregation, which complicates the public image the book presents.

About the Author

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born into slavery in Virginia and freed as a child at the end of the Civil War. After working his way through Hampton Institute, he became the first principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 and led it for the rest of his life. From the mid-1890s until his death he was the most influential Black leader in America, advising presidents and shaping philanthropy directed at Black education.