Booker Taliaferro Washington was born on April 5, 1856 in Franklin County, Virginia near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's Ford. He was an American educator and a black leader. When Booker was a child he worked in coal mines for nine months a year and spent the other three attending school. In 1875 he graduated after working his way through Hampton Institute. In 1881 he became the first president of Tuskegee Institute, a trade school for blacks that live in Alabama. When the Tuskegee Institute first opened it had only one teacher, about fifty students and 2,000 dollars a year from th…
