Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization

THIS is not a biography in the ordinary sense. The exhaustive "Life and Letters of Booker T. Washington" remains still to be compiled. In this more modest work we have simply sought to present and interpret the chief phases of the life of this man who rose from a slave boy to be the leader of ten millions of people and to take his place for all time among America's great men. In fact, we have not even touched upon his childhood, early training, and education, because we felt the story of those early struggles and privations had been ultimately well told in his own words in "Up from Slavery." This autobiography, however, published as it was fifteen years before his death, brings the story of his life only to the threshold of his greatest achievements. In this book we seek to give the full fruition of his life's work. Each chapter is complete in itself. Each presents a complete, although by no means exhaustive, picture of some phase of his life. 

We take no small satisfaction in the fact that we were personally selected by Booker Washington himself for this task. He considered us qualified to produce what he wanted: namely, a record of his struggles and achievements at once accurate and readable, put in permanent form for the information of the public. He believed that such a record could best be furnished by his confidential associate, working in collaboration with a trained and experienced writer, sympathetically interested in the welfare of the Negro race. This, then, is what we have tried to do and the way we have tried to do it. 

We completed the first four chapters before Mr. Washington's death, but he never read them. In fact, it was our wish, to which he agreed, that he should not read what we had written until its publication in book form.