I looked elsewhere in the book-nothing about his birth.

I looked at page 84 and found no mention of Washington’s birth, only a discussion of his mother Jane. The footnote included a link to the Internet Archive, where you can borrow West’s book for an hour at a time. The “ Overview ” section began with the sentence, “In 1856, Washington was born into slavery in Virginia as the son of Jane, an African-American slave.” This was followed by another footnote, citing Michael Rudolph West’s book The Education of Booker T. I went back to the Wikipedia article and scrolled down to see if there was more information on his birth. This was evidence, however, that Apwas at least widely accepted to be his birth date. This article, too, listed Washington’s birth date as April 5, 1856, but it provided no further citations. Next to Washington’s birth and death dates was a footnote linking to the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Booker T. Still, it was time to check the citations. I rather doubted this, given how prominent a figure Washington is and how dedicated Wikipedia’s editors are to ensuring accuracy. In 1901, when he wrote Up from Slavery, Washington knew neither his birthday nor his birth year-and he guessed he was born two or three years after 1856. It not only provided his birth year but the specific date: April 5, 1856. I checked the Wikipedia article on Booker T. My slideshow recorded his lifespan as 1856 to 1915. But my attention focused on this: “the year was 1858 or 1859.” I had just made a short slideshow on Washington’s life, highlighting his leadership at the Tuskegee Institute and his fundraising prowess, how he helped erect thousands of Black schools in the rural South. The passage is both droll (“I must have been born somewhere and at some time”) and sobering-he does not have this information because he was born as someone else’s legal property, not as a citizen. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time.

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. Washington begins his memoir by admitting ignorance about what is usually a key piece of biographical information: when he was born. I was faced with a question that took a few solid hours to answer, admittedly not a great example of time management on my part but such excursions are the work of history. Washington’s autobiography as an undergrad. The first paragraph, actually-something I didn’t notice when I first read Booker T.

I needed to reread Up from Slavery for the ninth-grade American history class I teach, but I got stuck on the first page.

Booker t washington biography book