I, Booker Taliaferro Washington, was born into slavery on a small farm in the back country of Virginia. I, like many other Americans of a darker skin were considered to be a piece
             of property of the whites, who owned plantations in the south. After the emancipation act was
             passed and I was declared a "free" black man, my mother, brother John and I, traveled many
             hundred miles from the plantation in Franklin County, Virginia to Malden in West Virginia, there
             we were joined with my step-father who worked in the salt furnaces and coal-mines. There, while
             attending the Kanawha Valley school I took the name Washington. Once while working in a coal
             mine I overheard some exciting and exhilarating news. I overheard two men talk of a school for
             the colored where poor but worthy students could work for their bed and board while learning a
             trade. This lead me to have a great ambition, that one day I would attend Hampton. After I was
             educated at the secondary school, I had dreamed of going to, Hampton Institute, I taught at an
             upgraded school, and there I was able to experiment some, with the studies of law and ministry.
             But it was a teaching position I had at Hampton, that helped me assure my future career.
             In the year 1881, I founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, in the Black Belt of Alabama. I persuaded southern white employees and governors that the Institute offered an education that would keep blacks on the farm and in the trades. But to blacks education was
             the means of escape from the web of sharecropping and debt and the conquest of attainable goals of self-employment, landownership, and small business. I gave many speeches and wrote many
             books in the years I ran the Tuskegee Institute. In 1892 Tuskegee held its first Negro Conference. The conference announced two goals: First, to find out the actual industrial, moral
             and educational condition of the masses. Sec...