The Future of the American Negro

Booker T Washington was an American educator, orator, author and the dominant leader of the African-American community nationwide from the 1890s to his death. Washington was born slave. After the Civil War he became head of Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. His "Atlanta Exposition" speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote. Washington