American Educators Bibliography Home Page

Published June 4, 2021
Updated March 15, 2023

Educators Bibliography

Booker T. Washington

These books were published at the turn of the 20th Century. I read Up From Slavery because Julius Rosenwald wrote that 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."

Peter E. Greulich, Author and Public Speaker

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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

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My Larger Education

”A wider acquaintance with men in all the different grades of life taught me that the Negro’s case is not peculiar. The majority of successful men are persons who have had difficulties to overcome, problems to master.

"And in overcoming those difficulties and mastering those problems, they have gained strength of mind and a clearness of vision that few persons who have lived a life of ease have been able to attain.

“Experience has taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the man who has no problems, to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied.”

Booker T. Washington, My Larger Education

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