DID YOU KNOW?
Anyway, after Booker’s birth, Jane was married to Washington Ferguson, a slave. The couple had a daughter named Amanda. James, Booker’s younger half-brother was adopted. During the American Civil War, Booker’s stepfather Washington Ferguson escaped from slavery and settled in Malden, West Virginia.
Now, Booker spent his first nine years as a slave on the Burroughs farm. He had
.
man of the African American community. Born into slavery in 1856 in Franklin County, Virginia. He studied at the Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia graduating with honors.
Washington then became the leader of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, with which he had a lifelong association. With his hard-work, he developed Tuskegee Institute into a leading university for the education of African Americans.
Now, his mother Jane was an enslaved cook of James Burroughs, a small planter in Franklin County. The identity of Booker’s father is not known. He might have been a white man in a neighboring plantation. Booker’s elder brother John, was also the son of an unknown white man.
a difficult childhood as he, his mother and his brother suffered in the shackles of slavery. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that legally freed more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans.
In 1865, when Booker was nine, he and his family in Virginia gained freedom under the Emancipation Proclamation as US troops occupied their region. After gaining freedom, Jane took her children to Malden to be reunited with her husband Washington Ferguson.
Education
Now, at the age of nine, Booker worked in a salt furnace packing salt. From the age of ten to twelve, he worked in a coal mine. Booker attended school while working in the mines. Here, he needed to provide a surname. He decided to adopt the name of his stepfathers first name as his surname. Later he came to know that his mother had named him Booker Taliaferro at the time of his birth. He honored his mother’s wish and assumed the name Booker Taliaferro Washington, by which he was known for the rest of his life.
In 1872, at the age of sixteen, Booker T. Washington enrolled himself at the Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia. The principal of the institute, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, had commanded black troops in the Civil War.
He arranged for a white benefactor to