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).
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.
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.
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.
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 think I have learned that the best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else.
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.
There is no escape — man drags man down, or man lifts man up.
Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.
The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do.