Nonfiction · 1901
Up from Slavery
An Autobiography
Booker T. Washington’s account of his own rise is also a brief for a programme: that the surest route out of the conditions slavery left behind is property, trade and skilled work — a brick made well, a field kept clean, a debt paid — and that recognition follows the work rather than precedes it.
Published in 1901, the book is calm to the point of self-effacement, and the calm is deliberate: it was written for white readers as much as for Black ones. That is what made it the most widely read Black autobiography of its time, and what made it contested from the moment it appeared — most sharply by W. E. B. Du Bois, who read the Atlanta address of 1895 as a bargain that gave away too much.
The volume prints Washington’s own preface and all seventeen chapters. The introduction a contemporary, Walter H. Page, wrote for the first edition is not included.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Preface
- Chapter I — A Slave Among Slaves
- Chapter II — Boyhood Days
- Chapter III — The Struggle for an Education
- Chapter IV — Helping Others
- Chapter V — The Reconstruction Period
- Chapter VI — Black Race and Red Race
- Chapter VII — Early Days at Tuskegee
- Chapter VIII — Teaching School in a Stable and a Hen-House
- Chapter IX — Anxious Days and Sleepless Nights
- Chapter X — A Harder Task Than Making Bricks Without Straw
- Chapter XI — Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie on Them
- Chapter XII — Raising Money
- Chapter XIII — Two Thousand Miles for a Five-Minute Speech
- Chapter XIV — The Atlanta Exposition Address
- Chapter XV — The Secret of Success in Public Speaking
- Chapter XVI — Europe
- Chapter XVII — Last Words
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of American Literature.
Source mind
About the author
1856–1915 · Victorian
Booker T. Washington (c. 1856–1915) was born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, educated himself at the Hampton Institute, and in 1881 became the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, which he built into the best-known Black institution in the country. His “Atlanta Compromise” address of 1895 made him the most prominent Black leader of his generation; Up from Slavery (1901) is his autobiography.
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