Booker T. Washington (1856 – 1915)
American political leader, educator and author of African ancestry, most famous for his tenure as President of Tuskegee University (1880–1915).
Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do.
Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.
There is no escape — man drags man down, or man lifts man up.
He was a thinker rooted in the Bible and Shakespeare, a lover of epigrams, a teller of folksy tales, a prodigious writer, and theatrical in his method of inspiring crowds.
I think I have learned that the best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else.
Booker T. Washington advised, networked, cut deals, made threats, pressured, punished enemies, rewarded friends, greased palms, manipulated the media, signed autographs, read minds with the skill of a master psychologist, strategized, raised money, always knew where the camera was pointing, traveled with an entourage, waved the flag with patriotic speeches, and claimed to have no interest in partisan politics. In other words, he was an artful politician. He was not a lawyer, scholar, college-bred man, or a military hero. But he knew how to use the power of symbolism through the lens of a storyteller.
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reached the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.
No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left without proper reward.
In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.
Cast down your bucket where you are.
Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.
I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
Opportunity is like a bald-headed man with only a patch of hair right in front. You have to grab that hair, grasp the opportunity while it's confronting you, else you'll be grasping a slick bald head.
Washington, unlike many other Black leaders of his time was a frequent traveler in the Deep South who knew the conditions firsthand instead of the abstract. Washington was a witness to the violence and racism of Jim Crow in the Black Belt and lived beside desperate poverty and illiteracy. Because of the paradoxical nature of being both a pragmatic realist and a utopian separatist, Washington sometimes expressed conflicting and ambiguous positions on issues.