Any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day. I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.
Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.
No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts. Character is power.
Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.
No race can prosper 'till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T.Washington (1856-1915): There are people whose abilities and energy take them far past any limitations life tries to place on them. Booker T. Washington was one of those people. He rose up from slavery and illiteracy to become the foremost educator and leader of black Americans at the turn of the century.
Lecturer, Civil Rights/Human Rights Activist, Educational Administrator, Professor, Organization Executive/Founder, Author/Poet Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Hale's Ford, Virginia, reportedly on April 5, 1856. After emancipation, his family was so poverty stricken that he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines beginning at age nine. Always an intelligent and curious child, he yearned for an education and was frustrated when he could not receive good schooling locally. When he was 16 his parents allowed him to quit work to go to school. They had no money to help him, so he walked 200 miles to attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia and paid his tuition and board there by working as the janitor.
Dedicating himself to the idea that education would raise his people to equality in this country, Washington became a teacher. He first taught in his home town, then at the Hampton Institute, and then in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. As head of the Institute, he traveled the country unceasingly to raise funds from blacks and whites both; soon he became a well-known speaker.
In 1895, Washington was asked to speak at the opening of the Cotton States Exposition, an unprecedented honor for an African American. His Atlanta Compromise speech explained his major thesis, that blacks could secure their constitutional rights through their own economic and moral advancement rather than through legal and political changes. Although his conciliatory stand angered some blacks who feared it would encourage the foes of equal rights, whites approved of his views. Thus his major achievement was to win over diverse elements among southern whites, without whose support the programs he envisioned and brought into being would have been impossible.
In addition to Tuskegee Institute, which still educates many today, Washington instituted a variety of programs for rural extension work, and helped to establish the National Negro Business League. Shortly after the election of President William McKinley in 1896, a movement was set in motion that Washington be named to a cabinet post, but he withdrew his name from consideration, preferring to work outside the political arena. He died on November 14, 1915.
