Booker T. Washington chose his own surname on his first school day
Born enslaved in Virginia and known only as Booker, he was freed at nine and taught himself to read. Asked for a surname at school, he picked Washington. By 1881 he was leading the new Tuskegee Institute, and for a quarter century he was Black America's most prominent leader.
Washington never knew his exact birth date; evidence found after his death points to April 5, 1856, on James Burroughs's plantation near Hale's Ford in Franklin County, Virginia. His mother, Jane, was enslaved; his father, said to be white, was never known to him. He later recalled that his family never once sat down together for a proper meal while enslaved, and that he watched the singing in the slave quarters grow bolder as freedom approached. Emancipation reached them in early 1865 when Union troops occupied the area.
After the war Jane led the children to West Virginia, where her husband Washington Ferguson had settled after fleeing slavery. Barred by law from schooling until then, Booker worked at teaching himself to read before attending classes for the first time. On learning that his mother had originally named him Booker Taliaferro, a name the enslaver never used, he took it back as his middle name.
Years in West Virginia salt furnaces and coal mines paid his way. At sixteen he travelled east, largely on foot, to Hampton Institute, a Virginia school for freedmen, working as a janitor to cover his costs. He also attended Wayland Seminary. In 1881 he became the first head of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Between 1890 and 1915 he was the leading figure among African Americans and the Black elite. He championed Black-owned business, helped found the National Negro Business League and assembled a national coalition of middle-class Black citizens, church leaders and white philanthropists and politicians around self-help and education. After his death in 1915 he was sharply criticised for accommodating white supremacy, even though he insisted his long-term aim was to end the disenfranchisement of Black Southerners, and activists of the 1950s civil rights era chose a more confrontational path.
Source: Booker T. Washington
