Booker T. Washington

The sister of my friend Claudia Anderson wrote a blog post inspired by Ed's "Quotation of the Day", based on BTW's birthday, today.  The QOTD is pasted in it's entirety below. Apologies for the formatting - I'm too lazy to fix it.  

(Ed is my "significant other")

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in

     writing a poem. 

                                         - Booker T. Washington

                                           (Up from Slavery)

             In all things that are purely social we [black and white] can be as separate as the

      fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. 

                                         - Washington 

                                           (speech at the Cotton States and International

                                           Exposition, Atlanta, 18 September 1895)  

             No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral

      well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

                                         - Washington

                                           (attributed) 

             As nearly as any man I have ever met, Booker T. Washington lived up to Micah's

      verse, "What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, have mercy, and

      walk humbly with thy God."

                                         - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

                                           (quoted in Stokes, A Brief Biography of

                                           Booker T. Washington)

     (Today is the 155th anniversary of the birth of Afro-American educator Booker T[aliaferro]

     Washington (1856-1915), born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia.  Washington worked

     in salt furnaces and coal mines after the Civil War before gaining an education at the

     Hampton Institute and becoming an instructor there.  In 1881, he founded the normal and

     industrial school for Afro-Americans at Tuskegee, Alabama that later became the Tuske-

     gee Institute, at one time the leading educational institution for black Americans.  An able

     orator, Washington believed fervently in economic independence as a necessary precursor

     to achieving full racial equality, and for this reason he was often criticized as what would

     now be called an "Uncle Tom" by other early black leaders.  Sadly, he seems largely for-

     gotten today, although I recall that during my youth he was revered as a leading exemplar

     of the power of education for African-American progress.  He is supposed to have noted,

                                  "No man can hold another man down in the ditch

                                   without remaining down in the ditch with him.")   

         Booker T. Washington: