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Booker Taliaferro Washington: (1856-1915)
"It is now long ago... I resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him." (From Up From Slavery, 1901) University of Illinois Press, The Booker T. Washington Papers
A bust, originally donated by the Tuskegee Institute, of Booker T. Washington sits in the American Colonial Cultural Garden among other such cultural greats as Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. The statue, which rests upon a marble base inscribed with Washington's words, a paraphrase of the above quote, has been the constant victim of vandalism. Like many other pieces of bronze art in the garden, the bust had been stolen and most likely sold for scrap. But Booker T. Washington's likeness also suffered a series of more traumatic attacks. According to the 11 August 1985, Plain Dealer article, "Pride and Prejudice" by Madeline Drexler, the bust was also blown up twice. The statue, which had been the focus of vandals most likely motivated by the racial tensions that plagued the Cultural Garden's neighborhood, has again been replaced.
Booker T. Washington was born in Virginia in 1856. The young Washington spent nine years on the small tobacco farm before he and the other slaves were released by the Emancipation Proclamation. Like many other newly freed African Americans, Booker T. still found his existence bound by manual labor and limitations based on the color of his skin. When Washington was 16 he began to attend a school for black students in Virginia. His admittance at Hampton Institute would finally allow Booker T. Washington to get the education he had long desired and long been denied. Scholarship agreed with the young man and soon Washington found himself in the role of educator, first at Hampton Institute and later at Tuskegee Institute, the school in Alabama he established in 1881. It was, in part, his role as activist for the education of blacks that made Booker T. Washington the grand cultural figure that is memorialized in the Cultural Gardens.
Photographs:
Further Reading:
University of Illinois Press, The Booker T. Washington Papers
National Parks Service, Booker T. Washington
University of Virginia, Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
UNC, Documenting the American South, Booker T. Washington Up from Slavery
Alabama Department of Archives and History, Booker T. Washington