Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Washington, Booker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140390510 ISBN 13: 9780140390513

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1986

Synopsis

Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans like "cast down your buckets," which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans' success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society.

About this title

Review:

"This is an excellent book. It addresses a number of issues important to African American history and literature. The introduction is very successful in exposing the tension between the subject of autobiography--the crafted public self--and the far more complex, indeed enigmatic subject of real life. For those interested in the role of the individual in history, this book sheds light on the way Booker T. Washington used his skills of self-representation to amass power and influence in a racist society--his identity imposed forever upon the politics of racial self-help and the history of the New South."

From the Back Cover:

For half a century from its publication in 1902 Up from Slavery was the best-known book written by an African American. The life of ex-slave Booker T. Washington embodied the legendary rise of the American self-made man, and his autobiography gave prominence for the first time to the voice of a group which had to pull itself up from extreme adversity. Washington attributes his success to his belief in many of the virtues celebrated by Benjamin Franklin: selflessness, industry, pragmatism, and optimism. But from behind the mask of the humble, plainspoken schoolmaster come hints that reveal Washington the ambitious and tough-minded analyst of power, who had to balance the demands of blacks with the constraints imposed on him by whites. To read Up from Slavery is to explore the means by which Washington rose to become the most influential and powerful black American of his time. How far he compromised African American rights in order to achieve his aims remains a matter of controversy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0140390510
• ISBN 13: 9780140390513
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400