American Educators Bibliography Home Page

Published June 4, 2021
Updated May 10, 2022

Educators Bibliography

 Educator

Book(s)

Booker T. Washington

These books were published at the turn of the 20th Century. I read Up From Slavery because Julius Rosenwald said it was one of two books that most affected his life. While I was pondering how to start off these reviews of two American classics that I had not read before, I saw an article entitled, "Be the design you want to see in the world."

​I thought to myself that this idea summarizes the goal of his books and the life of Booker T. Washington better than anything I would ever come up with.

He reveals himself to the ages through these two books.

Up From Slavery

In high school, we read and openly discussed the book, Black like Me. I wish this would have been a follow-on assignment. ​Mr. Washington today speaks to me not as a black man ...

... but as a man who transcended race. 

He accomplished what he wrote, "The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race."

---

Character Building

​"Many of this eminent negro leader’s friends think that the best literary work that he has done is the Sunday-Evening talks to the students of Tuskegee Institute, which he is in the habit of making when he is home. ...They are all earnest and show the constructive quality of his mind. … 

"There is plenty of good sense in the book, and admonition, that, if heeded, would place the black race above the white. Indeed, there is sound advice in it for the reading of white men as well as black.”

​​The Richmond Virginia Times, August 31, 1902

---

Return to Bibliography Overview Home Page