Up from Slavery

Up from Slavery (1901) is Booker T. Washington's account of his own life — from his birth into slavery in Virginia in the late 1850s; through his liberation as a boy at the end of the Civil War; through the years of crushing poverty in West Virginia; through his unlikely admission to Hampton Institute; to his work, beginning in 1881, as the founding principal of the Tuskegee Institute in rural Alabama.

The book made Washington the most famous and most powerful African-American of his era. It also placed him at the centre of a great strategic argument with W. E. B. Du Bois about the path forward for African-American advancement — whether through pragmatic industrial training and economic self-reliance, or through full civil and political rights and the cultivation of a college-educated leadership class. The book is the principal statement of Washington's side of that argument.