Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

First published: 1901

The Work

Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, by Booker T. Washington, is an account of his life, which began in slavery and ended with his being a renowned educator. It is written in a simple style with an optimistic tone that suggests to African Americans that they can succeed through self-improvement and hard work. Although Up from Slavery has been ranked along with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791) as a classic story of personal achievement, critics disagree about its central theme. Some scholars complain of its conciliatory stance, while others see the work as a justification for black pride.

The book opens with Washington’s boyhood hardships, beginning with his life as a slave on a Virginia plantation where the lack of a family name and a history that would give identity to his existence was painful and difficult to understand. He mentions the slaves’ fidelity and loyalty to the master, but he stresses the brutality of the institution: A lack of refinement in living, a poor diet, bad clothing, and ignorance were the slave’s lot.

A struggle for literacy is the focus in the intermediate chapters. Leaving the plantation with his mother and stepfather after the Civil War, Washington moved to West Virginia to work in salt and coal mines, where he learned letters while doing manual labor and used trickery to escape work and get to school on time. His situation improved after he was employed as a house servant by a Mrs. Ruffner, who taught him the value of cleanliness and work, lessons he put to good use when he sought admission to Hampton Institute, a Virginia school for poor African Americans. There Washington received an education that led to a teaching job. Throughout these chapters, he gives the impression that his early hardships were a challenge that gave impetus to his later success. He stresses the dignity of labor and the importance of helping others as the means of getting ahead.

Beginning with chapter seven, Washington discusses his work at Tuskegee Institute, where classes were first taught in a stable and a hen house, and he takes pride in the growth of the school from an original enrollment of thirty students to a large body of students from twenty-seven states and several foreign countries. His educational theories conform to his belief in manual labor rather than intellectual pursuit, and he stresses economic growth as the important goal.

The later portion of the book is primarily a chronicle of fundraising and an account of grants and gifts. His image as a national leader is firmly established, and he includes newspaper comments on his speeches as well as answers to the critics regarding his Atlanta address. In “Last Words,” Washington expresses his hope for an end to racial prejudice.

Bibliography

Cain, William E. “Forms of Self-Representation in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. ” Prospects 12 (1987): 201-222. Cain deals effectively with an often-neglected aspect of Up from Slavery, its literary style. Washington deliberately and carefully crafted the wording of his book in a conscious attempt to avoid seeming egocentric. According to Cain, Washington consciously used a literary counterpart to the typical self-effacement acts used by black people of that period to avoid clashes with white people.

Carroll, Rebecca, ed. Uncle Tom or New Negro: African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and “Up From Slavery One Hundred Years Later.” New York: Broadway Books/Harlem Moon, 2006. Compilation of personal essays African American businesspeople, artists, writers, and political leaders, who discuss Washington’s legacy and its meaning to each essayist.

Daniel, Pete. “Up from Slavery and Down to Peonage: The Alonzo Bailey Case.” Journal of American History 57 (December, 1970): 654-670. An interesting addendum to typical coverage of Washington. Daniel discusses in detail the case of Alonzo Bailey, an Alabama laborer who had received a monetary advance for a job he did not complete. The state law imposed punishment on offenders as if they had stolen money from the prospective employer and was used to control African Americans as though they were slaves. Washington supported the eventually successful effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Alabama law.

Fitzgerald, Charlotte D. “The Story of My Life and Work: Booker T. Washington’s Other Autobiography.” The Black Scholar 21 (Fall, 1991): 35-40. Unknown to many people is an earlier version of Washington’s Up from Slavery, published a year earlier. Fitzgerald reveals that it was poorly written by an incompetent ghostwriter. It is significant that he said more in the original version about self-help and less about those things that made him appear accommodationist. It is suggested that he was trying in his second edition to avoid offending former slaveholders.

Horton, James O., and Lois E. Horton. “Race and Class (Contemporary America).” American Quarterly 35 (Spring/Summer, 1983): 155-168. A succinct connected narrative on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and William J. Wilson in challenging the rigid racial and class barriers in the United States. Each functioned within a distinctive historical setting but was part of a continuum.

Howard-Pitney, David. “The Jeremiads of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and Changing Patterns of Black Messianic Rhetoric, 1841-1920.” Journal of American Ethnic History 6 (Fall, 1986): 47-61. A valuable discussion of the messianic-prophetic dimension of black leadership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although more accommodationist than Douglass or Du Bois, Washington appears as a genuinely prophetic voice in the black quest for liberation.

James, Jacqueline. “Uncle Tom? Not Booker T.” American Heritage 19 (1968): 50-63, 95-100. A fresh approach to a traditional theme. James shows that “Uncle Tom” is an inappropriate rubric to define Washington, since he was always fighting in his own way for racial equality. Washington realized, she stresses, that an overt challenge to the system would only result in worsening conditions.