Born a slave in Virginia in 1856 Booker T. Washington was a man who wanted a great education for his people. His mother married a short time after his birth. He was a slave on the farm of James Borroughs for the first 9 years of his life, but while he was still 9 his mother moved to Madlen, West Virginia to join her husband who had moved there earlier to find work. Booker T. Washington was put to work packing salt. At the age of 10, he began to work in a coal mine and attend school. In 1871 he began to work as a houseboy for the wife of the owner of the mines. A year later, at the age of 16, he entered the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia( now Hampton university.)He walked most of the way on foot, arriving there with no money.His entrance to the school was to clean a room.A teacher examined his work by wiping the surface with a white handkerchief. The handkerchief was spotless so he was admitted. Booker T. Washington worked as a janitor to pay for his room and board.In 1875 he graduated from Hampton and returned to Madlen to teach.He returned to Hampton in 1879 and taught a program for Native Americans.
In 1880, a bill that included a yearly provision of $2,000 was passed by the Alabama State Legislature to establish a school for black people in Macon County.Governor Rufus Willis Cobb signed the bill into law, creating the Tuskegee Normal School for the training of Black teachers.Booker T. Washington was chosen for the job of principal.When he arrived, no land, or buildings had been acquired, but he was not intimidated.He began to recruit students for the school and in 1881 on the 4th of July the school was opened in a shanty owned by a black church.Booker T. Washington borrowed money from the treasurer of Hampton and used it to buy and abandoned 100 acre plantation.The students made bricks for buildings and sold some of them to raise money.Within a few years they had built a classroom building, a dining hall, a girl’s dormitory and a church. By 1888, it was 540 acres and had over 400 students.It offered training in such trades as carpentry, cabinetmaking, printing, and shoe making. Boys also studied farming and dairying, while girls studied cooking and sewing.The students had a strict schedule, and were required to get up at 5:30 in the morning and go to sleep at 9:30.All students had to attend church every day.
George Washington Carver became director of the agriculture program in 1896.Booker T. Washington married 3 times, first to Fannie N. Smith, who died two years later, leaving behind an baby girl named Portia.In 1885 he married Olivia Davidson, the assistant principal of Tuskegee.They had two sons, Booker Taliaferro, Jr. and Ernest Davidson.She died four years later, in 1889.In 1893, Washington was married to Margaret Murray, who had come to Tuskegee as lady principal in 1889 and also directed the programs for girl students and originated the Women’s Meetings.Margaret and her Booker T. Washington’s three children and four grandchildren lived longer than Washington, who died November 14, 1915, at age fifty-nine of arteriosclerosis and exhaustion.Booker T. Washington died after an illness in St. Luke’s hospital, where he had been admitted on November 5. Aware that he didn’t have much time left, he left with his wife and his physician, on November 12, so that he could die in Tuskegee.His funeral was on November 17 in the Tuskegee Institute Church and was attended by nearly 8,000 people. He was buried in a brick tomb, made by students, on a hill with a view of the entire campus.
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