Up from Slavery

       In the book Up from Slavery Booker Washington traces his journey as a slave and his determination to get education which transforms him to an educator with an out of the slave mentality. Slavery not only affected the Negroes, but also the white race morally, he outlines how he founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama which, as he narrates grows to a campus with many new buildings. He also outlines the emphasis the institution lays on how education and learning trade go hand-in-hand. Washington describes his career as a civil rights activists and a public speaker and describes an address he gave at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 which made him to stand on the same platform with white speakers (Washington, 1995). In the conclusion of his autobiography, he accounts several recognitions he received for his work. Washington begins with a preface in which explains how he came to write his autobiography; this is followed by well illustrated seventeen chapters, which chronologically describe his rise from a life as slave to an educator and a public speaker.

  Washington illustrates how after Emancipation proclamation, some slaves under contract worked with their masters to buy their freedom, a man from Ohio worked to pay for his debt so that he could enjoy his freedom and fulfill his promise to his master, this illustrates generous relationship between the slaves and their masters. After freedom came, changing of names and movement out of plantations was done to test if the freedom existed. Schools for the colored were put in place to prepare Negroes for positions in the south; Booker emphasizes the idea of value of education throughout his autobiography, because as a slave, he had been denied the right to learn, he opens a school with the help of prominent Negroes to admit more students of Indian origin and colored race.