Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia and freed as a boy at the end of the Civil War. He describes working in salt furnaces and coal mines, walking much of the way to the Hampton Institute and sweeping a room as his entrance examination, and then, at twenty-five, founding the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in a borrowed church and a shanty, where students built the school with their own hands. His creed is education, work and self-reliance.

Published in 1901, the autobiography made Washington the most famous Black American of his day, though his gradual approach was challenged by others, such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Thirteen LibriVox volunteers read it in about eight hours.