Up from Slavery

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1856 — he was never sure of the exact date. He was nine years old when the Civil War ended and his family walked out of the plantation with nothing. Forty-five years later he wrote this account of what happened in between.

It is one of the great American success stories, and also one of the most argued-over books ever written by an American. Washington describes the cabin with dirt floor, the salt pork and cornbread, the hunger for letters that drove him to walk hundreds of miles to Hampton Institute and pay his tuition by working as a janitor. He describes building Tuskegee from an empty field, brick by brick, made by students who had never held a trowel.

Listeners should know what they are getting. This is not a protest book, and Washington was criticised for it in his own lifetime, most sharply by W. E. B. Du Bois. He writes about slavery without dwelling on its cruelty, and he counsels patience and self-improvement rather than confrontation. Whether that was strategy or accommodation is a question each listener has to answer for themselves — but the book is the evidence, and it deserves to be heard in full rather than summarised.

This edition reads the complete text, including the preface by the author and the account of the Atlanta Exposition address.

Narrated in a single voice at a steady pace, suitable for long listening sessions.