Booker T. Washington
By Robert E. Park
WITH the possible exception of Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt, there is no man in America today whose name is known to so many different persons and in so many different parts of the world as is the name of Booker T. Washington, principal and founder of the industrial school for negroes in the little, quaint, old-fashioned, ante-bellum town of Tuskegee, Alabama, and author of Up From Slavery, a book which has been translated into all of the languages of Europe. Booker T. Washington was born some time about 1858 or 1859—he is himself not quite sure of the date—on a slave plantation near Hale's Ford, in Franklin county, Virginia. His mother, who went by the name of "Aunt Jane," was the plantation cook. His father was a white man; Booker Washington never knew him, or, if he did, never claimed him. When his master, whose name was Burroughs, died, some time during the Civil War, an inventory was made of his property. A copy of this inventory is still in the possession of the Burroughs family. It contains, among others, the names of the slave, "Booker," his mother, brother, a sister, and some other more distant relatives. At that time Booker Washington, who is now regarded as one of the world's "most useful citizens," was valued at the conservative sum of $300. His brother John, who was considered the more promising of the two, was valued at $400.
The United States has been called the "land of opportunities," and the twentieth century has inherited from the nineteenth the legend of an amazing progress, and of the miraculous rise from poverty to prosperity, from obscurity to greatness, of many of its most important citizens; but surely there is in America no other instance of a man, who, starting so low has risen so high, none whose personal history more completely illustrates the possibilities of American life at the end of the nineteenth century, as that of the man who, born a
