Booker T. Washington (April 5th, 1856-November 14th, 1915) was a prominent force in the African-American community and was an educator and an author.

Booker T. Washington was actually born of mixed decent, with a white father, whom he never knew, and a slave mother, who would later be “freed” in 1863 due to the Emancipation Proclamation. After the Civil War ended in 1865, he moved to West Virginia to work in the coal mines. After some time, he attended Hampton University and then Wayland Seminary to become an instructor. In 1881he became the first president of the new normal school of Hampton University, Tuskegee University in Alabama, and stayed there the rest of his life.

On September 18th, 1895, Washington gave what many consider to be one of the most influential speeches in American history, entitled the Atlanta Compromise in Atlanta, Georgia. The speech was given in front of a predominately white audience and was on the topic of race relations. In his speech, he gave a call to blacks to join the work force in the South because, he says, the South is where blacks were given a chance opposed to the North. He then goes on to tell the whites that they should hire the some eight million blacks in the country instead of relying on the some one million immigrants a year. However, Washington goes on and endorses segregation, saying that whites and blacks could exist as separate figures of hand.

The white audience gave thunerous applause at the end of the speech, of course, because Washington, a prominent figure in black America, was endorsing segregation. The black community, however, saw this as a false representation. One of Washington’s biggest critics was W.E.B. DuBois. He said that Washington’s speech was encouraging the whites to hold on to the thought of the old guard, making blacks inferior. He believed that if Washington had not given his speech, Plessy V. Ferguson would not have ended with a decision for separate but equal.

Booker T. Washington died on November 14th, 1915 at the age of 59 at what was believed to have been due to arteriosclerosis. In 2006, permission was given to examine his medical records, which showed that he had died to hypertension and a blood pressure more than twice the normal blood pressure. However, he still lives on through his writings and through people’s research.