Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was an important and inspiring African American figure. He was born a slave in Virginia in 1856, and with a lot of effort put himself through school to become a teacher. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an African American University.

He was an important business and political figure as a writer and advisor. He was criticized, especially by W.E.B. DuBois, for submission and silence to the African American’s civil and political rights. But to this day he remains one inspiration man, who made a great impact and who worked to improve African Americans to his death in 1915, while still head of Tuskegee Institute.