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Booker T. Washington was one of the most powerful African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Born a slave in Hale's Ford, Virginia, the son of a white man who did not acknowledge him and a slave woman named Jane (Burroughs) who later married a fellow slave, Booker T. Washington became a leader in black education, and a strong influence as a racial representative in national politics.

Washington learned to read and write in the late 1860s at a primary school overseen by the Freedmen's Bureau and in 1872 became a student at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he excelled.

At Tuskegee, Washington developed a vocational curriculum that emphasized carpentry, printing, tinsmithing, and shoemaking. Girls also took classes in cooking and sewing, and boys studied farming methods.

Washington was known as a racial accommodationist.

He rejected the pursuit of political and social equality with whites in favor of developing vocational skills and a reputation for stability and dependability.

In a famous 1895 Atlanta address, Washington urged African Americans to "cast down your buckets where you are," that is, to remain in the Jim Crow South and tolerate racial discrimination rather than make what he considered intemperate calls for equality.

"In all things that are purely social," he said, blacks and whites "can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."