Up From Slavery

Book Description:

Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington’s Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans like "cast down your buckets," which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans’ success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society.

"Up From Slavery" is the classic autobiography of one of the most controversial figures in American history, Booker T. Washington. "Up From Slavery", recounts Washington’s rise from a Virginia tobacco farm slave to his long standing tenure as President of the famed Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. Washington’s message is one of the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment for as he put it, "the individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race." His message of self-empowerment has been a dramatic force in the fight for racial equality and shall forever be remembered in the annals of American history.