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Booker Washington's Influence On Education

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Booker Taliaferro Washington was born on April 5th, 1856 in Hales’s Ford, VA. His mother, Jane was a slave who worked as a cook for a plantation owner named James Burroughs. His father was an unknown white man most likely from a plantation nearby so Washington wasn’t even fully black, but it didn’t even matter back then. Washington and his mother lived in a one-room log cabin with a large fireplace, which also acted as the plantation’s kitchen.
At a young age, Booker worked on the plantation by carrying sacks of grain to the plantation’s mill. Carrying 100-pound sacks at a time, and being beat for not doing it satisfactorily shows how brutal slavery was. Booker was exposed to education at an early age as well, he would peer into the window of a school house near his plantation, he was astonished to see children his age sitting at desks and reading books. It made him eager to do what those children were doing, but sadly he couldn’t since it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, well at least not in a formal setting most slaves learned how to read and write in secret and hid the fact they knew how to do it out of fear of the …show more content…

Washington left home destined for more knowledge in 1872. Taking various jobs along the way, Booker walked 500 miles to Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia. We have to remember there were no official roads or GPS in these days, this was a grueling long walk, and nonetheless Booker pushed through it. Once he reached the school Booker didn’t have a “pot to piss in” as my grandmother would say, he convinced the administrators to let him go to the school and to give him as a janitor to help pay for his tuition. Seeing his hard work and dedication, the school’s founder, and headmaster: General Samuel C. Armstrong offered him a scholarship sponsored by a white man. Armstrong was a commander for the Union in the Civil War and a strong advocator of giving newly freed slaves an education, he became a mentor to

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