Booker T. Washington

1856–1915 · Educator, orator & founder of Tuskegee Institute

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in Virginia and rose to become the founding principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. The most prominent Black leader in America from the 1890s until his death, he championed vocational education and economic self-reliance — a philosophy crystallized in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address and his best-selling autobiography Up from Slavery (1901).

Traced to source

5 quotes we’ve traced to Booker T. Washington

“Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon them”

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“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”

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“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem”

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“Success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached as by the obstacles overcome”

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“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way”

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