Born: April 5, 1856, Hale's Ford, VA

Education: Hampton Institute, B.A. honors, 1875; Wayland Seminary, 1878

Died: November 14, 1915, Tuskegee, AL

Washington founded Tuskegee Institute (1881) and industrial arts training was its model for racial uplift. “I believe that the negro problem can be worked out only in the south,” he wrote, “and by education” (Indianapolis Journal, August 16, 1899).

He led pragmatically. In face of Jim Crow, lynching, and blacks’ loss of civil rights, he solicited aid from northern industrialists to train black hands, promoting “self-help, industry, sobriety, and thrift.” Also, he built a “Tuskegee Machine” of black businesses and organizations, which isolated his critics, controlled Republican patronage for blacks, and influenced white philanthropy to black education.

Washington's speech to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 elevated him “to the plateau of his power.” Blacks must cultivate moral character and economic independence rather than agitate for suffrage and racial equality, he said. Deprecating migration, he told them to “cast down your buckets where you are.” He addressed realities of segregation by telling the audience that “socially we can be as separate as the fingers, but one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” After his “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington became African Americans’ chief spokesman and, in the judgment of one editor, “the foremost educator among the coloured people of the world.”