Hello,

I was born a slave on a small farm in western Virginia, I was nine years old when the Civil War ended. I worked in a salt furnace as soon as i turned ten started serving as a houseboy for a white family where I first learned the virtues of frugality, cleanliness, and personal morality. I was educated at Hampton Institute, one of the earliest freedmen's schools devoted to industrial education. Growing up during Reconstruction and imbued with moral as opposed to intellectual training, I came to believe that postwar social uplift had begun at the wrong end. I was a pragmatist who engaged in deliberate ambiguity in order to sustain white recognition of my leadership. Such visibility won me international fame and the role of black adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. I widely read autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), stands as a classic in the genre of narratives by American self-made men, as well as the prime source for me social and historical philosophy. My philosophy did not long survive my death, but in theory and practice, my views on economic self-reliance have remained one of the deepest strains in Afro-American thought.

-Booker T. Washington