Entries from Come Sit a While that draw on the words of Booker T. Washington.
Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856–1915) was born into slavery on a small tobacco farm in Franklin County, Virginia. He did not know the day of his own birth, and he never knew his father. As a boy he slept on a dirt floor and was sent before dawn to carry sacks of grain to the mill, beaten if he was late. When emancipation came at the end of the Civil War, he was about nine years old, and he went to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia — rising at four in the morning to labor, then walking to a makeshift schoolhouse afterward, desperate to learn to read. Hearing of a school for Black students hundreds of miles away — the Hampton Institute — he set out for it with almost nothing in his pockets, traveling the last stretch on foot and sleeping under a wooden sidewalk. When he arrived, exhausted and filthy, the head teacher tested him by asking him to sweep a room. He swept it three times and dusted it four; she ran a handkerchief over the woodwork and found not a particle of dust. “I guess you will do,” she said. That swept room was his entrance examination. In 1881 he founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, beginning with a leaky shanty and a handful of students, and built it over decades into one of the most respected schools in the nation. His autobiography, Up from Slavery, remains an American classic.
Entries featuring Booker T. Washington
- The Measure of the Climb (2026-03-09)
Drawn from 1 entries · refreshed July 24, 2026