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Up From Slavery

Up From Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of Booker T. Washington detailing his slow and steady rise from a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton University, to his work establishing vocational schools—most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. He reflects on the generosity of both teachers and philanthropists who helped in educating blacks and native Americans. He describes his efforts to instill manners, breeding, health and a feeling of dignity to students, and the futility of teaching only intellectual, classical subjects as later espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois and others.

Quotes

• "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."

• "During the next half-century and more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; in our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet smile, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all."

• "Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work."

External links

• Full text available in .pdf format (http://www.studenthandouts.com/upfromslavery.pdf)
• Up From Slavery at Project Gutenberg
• Also available at Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=xN45ZsUMgKEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=up+from+slavery)