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Up from Slavery - Booker T. Washington, Louis R. Harlan
Up from Slavery
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Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's "Up from Slavery" is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders,... show more
Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's "Up from Slavery" is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans like 'cast down your buckets', which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic 'Atlanta Compromise' speech of 1895, believed that 'political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]', and that 'property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character' would prove necessary to black Americans' success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society.
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Format: paperback
ISBN: 9780140390513 (0140390510)
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Pages no: 400
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
Lisa (Harmony)
Lisa (Harmony) rated it
3.0 Up from Slavery (Signet Classics)
The Preface, by William Andrews, a scholar of African-American literature, called the 1901 autobiography Up From Slavery "one of the few African-American texts that can be legitimately termed a classic" and its subject, Booker T. Washington, "one of the most controversial figures in African-American...
spocksbro
spocksbro rated it
I read this book in 2nd or 3rd grade. I can remember the scene: The teacher had spread out a group of biographies on the Willie Harris Elementary school library's table and asked us to chose one to read and do a report on. For whatever reason, I picked up Booker Washington's and enjoyed it. It was p...
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