Booker T. Washington #1533

Caption from poster__     Booker T. Washington “The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get  from books and costly apparatus that is  equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.”       Few things can Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American political leader, educator and author. He was one of the dominant figures in African American history in the United States from 1890 to 1915. Washington was born into slavery to a slave owner [father], and a slave [mother] in Franklin County, Virginia. He eventually learned to read and write while working at manual labor jobs. At the age of sixteen, he went to Hampton, Virginia to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, now Hampton University, to train as a teacher. In 1881, he was named as the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He was granted an honorary Masters of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1896 and a