Booker T. Washington Summary

            Book summary - Up From Slavery The book, Up From Slavery, written by Booker Taliaferro Washington, profoundly touched me when I read it. Washington accomplished many amazing obstacles throughout his life. He became perhaps the most prominent black leader of his time. Blacks could gain equality by improving their economic situation through education rather than by demanding equal rights that was termed the Atlanta Compromise. Washington's life story was told during the mid to late 1800's into the early 1900's, in the time when the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation was one major event in history that forever changed our country. All slaves were free and had to go find a new place to live and a new place to work. When the slaves were first freed there was alot of hostile feelings from the whites towards the newly freed slaves. To blacks living within post- Reconstruction South, Washington offered industrial education as the means of escape from sharecropping and allowed blacks to become self-employed, while owning their own land, or small business. Booker over came the obstacles of the free black man by educating himself and other blacks to become "equal" to whites. Until the start of World War I African Americans had a difficult time. His speaking tours and private persuasion tried to equalize public educational opportunities and to reduce racial violence. There were many gains earned after the Civil War seemed lost by the time of World War I because racial violence and lynching reached an all time high. However, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL) were founded by blacks and whites during this time. Both of these major civil rights organizations make efforts on the part of blacks and their white allies to insure that the United States provides "freedom and justice to all".