Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was an American educator, who pushed for blacks to strengthen themselves through educational accomplishments and economic advancement.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born as a slave on the Burrough's tobacco plantation in Hale's Ford, Virginia on April 5, 1856. His mother was a cook and his father was a white man. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, his family moved to Malden, West Virginia. Since his family was poor, he could not attend school. He began to work in coal mines and salt furnaces at the age of nine. When he was sixteen, he quit worki…