Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Garden CityNew York Doubleday, Page & Company 1918
Copyright, 1916, by Doubleday, Page & Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE OUTLOOK PUBLISHING CO.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

IN THE passing of a character so unique as Dr. Booker T. Washington, many of us, his friends, were anxious that his biography should be written by those best qualified to do so. It is therefore a source of gratification to us of his own race to have an account of Dr. Washington's career set forth in a form at once accurate and readable, such as will inspire unborn generations of Negroes and others to love and appreciate all mankind of whatever race or color. It is especially gratifying that this biography has been prepared by the two people in all America best fitted, by antecedents and by intimate acquaintance and association with Dr. Washington, to undertake it. Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe is the grandson of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin had a very direct influence on the abolition of slavery, and Mr. Emmett J. Scott was Dr. Washington's loyal and trusted secretary for eighteen years.
Robert R. Moton. Principal Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.
Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, August 1, 1916.

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.