Booker T Washington
Booker T Washington was recognized as the outstanding American black man of his day and the supreme black example of the success hero. Washington believed that his life, was a model, not an exception, and his famous Atlanta Compromise address in 1895 was the charter for racial peace, not an acceptance of second class status. As violence swirled around black southerners, Washington remained strangely optimistic about race relations. Whites could look to Washington for calming words, reassurance, accommodation; humble and oppressed blacks could vicariously share Washington’s success and power. ... In his more ruthless struggle to fight off his critics and to retain his power, however, Washington showed a different personality. ... Washington began life about April 5, 1865, as a slave on the James Burroughs farm near Hale’s Ford, Virginia, the son of a house servant and unidentified white men. ... Traveling to Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in Virginia, he gained training which qualified him for teaching, while paying part of the cost of his education through Hampton, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who gave Washington’s career his guidance until his death in 1893, and whose social philosophy Washington adopted as the guiding principle of his life.