Booker T. Washington National Monument!

What Is Booker T. Washington National Monument?

This park preserves and interprets the old Burroughs Farm, birthplace of Booker T. Washington!

What Makes It Historical?

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born in a 14×16 log cabin on this land on April 5, 1856! His mother, Jane, was a plantation cook, and his father, well, wasn’t a part of his life. For his first nine years, Mr. Washington grew up in slavery with his half brother and half sister, hauling grain to the mill, bringing water to the field workers, and carrying books for the Burroughses’ daughters, though he was not allowed to get an education himself. He would memorialize this in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901!

All that changed when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect here in 1865, and Mr. Washington’s family was freed! Jane took her young’uns to West Virginia, where her husband, Washington Ferguson, lived. There, young Booker picked up his full name so that he could register for school for the first time! Working his way up out of the coal mines, he attended Hampton Institute in Virginia then Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC! Then, by 1881, he accepted an invitation to lead the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, which Mr. Washington expanded from a single room to a hundred buildings with 1,500 students, 200 faculty members, and a $2 million endowment!

But Mr. Washington had his fair share of controversy, butting heads with the likes of W.E.B. Dubois as they navigated the new freedoms and limitations that Black folks found in the aftermath of the Civil War. Mr. Washington wanted to focus on trades, skills, and education to earn the respect of white folks, while Mr. Dubois saw the need for more active protesting to claim rights like integration and voting! Secretly, though, Mr. Washington funded litigation for civil rights cases that challenged both of those issues!

How Can I #HelpTheHelpers?

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Be a responsible visitor! Remember the old adages: Pack out what you pack in! Take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints!