Questions to Ask Booker T. Washington
For a student who has drawn Booker T. Washington in an interview-a-historical-figure assignment, and for the teacher setting it. The list follows the order of his life in six groups: early years, Tuskegee, the Atlanta speech, Du Bois, presidents and donors, and looking back. Several are meant to be uncomfortable, because much of what he did was kept out of public view, and an interview that only admires him misses the man in his letters.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Early years
You were born into slavery on a Virginia farm and never knew your own birthday. What do you remember of those first years?
Why ask it
He opens his autobiography with this uncertainty: born around 1856 on the Burroughs farm in Franklin County, in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor that doubled as the plantation kitchen. Follow up by asking about his mother, Jane, the cook, since she is the figure those chapters keep returning to.
What do you remember about the day freedom was announced?
Why ask it
His account has the enslaved people called up to the big house, a paper read aloud, and his mother kissing her children with tears on her face; he was about nine. Do not stop at the celebration. He writes that within hours the rejoicing gave way to the question of where to go and how to eat, and that second half of the memory gives an interview more to work with.
After the war your family moved to Malden, West Virginia, and you packed salt before dawn. What did a boy learn in a salt furnace?
Why ask it
The first thing he ever learned to read was the number 18, the mark on his stepfather's salt barrels. Later he went down the coal mines too, so this question establishes that for him school came after a shift and never instead of one.
How did you learn to read before there was any school you could go to?
Why ask it
His mother got hold of a spelling book and he worked through the alphabet alone. When a school for Black children opened in Malden his stepfather kept him at the furnace, so his first lessons were at night. He also admits to moving the furnace clock forward so he could reach the day class on time, a small confession that makes him sound like a real child.
Where did the name Washington come from?
Why ask it
At his first school roll call he noticed the other children had two names, so he announced 'Booker Washington' on the spot; only later did he learn his mother had named him Booker Taliaferro. It is an easy one for a younger class, and it lets him talk about what it meant to choose a surname after slavery.
What did Mrs. Viola Ruffner teach you that you were still using forty years later?
Why ask it
She was the wife of the mine and furnace owner, he was her houseboy, and she had a reputation for being impossible to please about dirt, order and honesty. He counted those lessons as part of his education, which is worth remembering when he gets to the sweeping test at Hampton.
You set out for Hampton Institute in 1872 with about five hundred miles to cover and almost nothing in your pocket. What was the worst night of that trip?
Why ask it
He reached Richmond penniless and slept under a raised plank sidewalk, unloading a ship by day to pay for food. Ask who helped him leave Malden: he remembers older neighbors, themselves once enslaved, handing him a nickel, a quarter or a handkerchief.
Your entrance exam at Hampton was to sweep a classroom. What was going through your head while you did it?
Why ask it
By his telling he swept the room three times and dusted it four before the head teacher, Mary Mackie, ran her handkerchief over the woodwork and admitted him. Put the awkward follow-up to him: was that a fair test of a student, or a sign of what the school expected him to become?
What did General Samuel Armstrong give you that the books at Hampton could not?
Why ask it
Armstrong, Hampton's founder, was a missionary's son from Hawaii who had commanded Black troops in the Civil War, and he preached work, thrift and character as the road up. Historians still argue over how much of Tuskegee was Armstrong's design and how much was Washington's own, so ask him directly.
As a young man you were drawn toward politics and the law. Why did you end up in a classroom?
Why ask it
After graduating he taught in Malden, then spent some months at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and came away unimpressed by students who had Latin and Greek but, as he saw it, no way to earn a living. Keep the answer in your notes, because that opinion is the seed of his later argument with Du Bois.
Tuskegee
When you arrived in Tuskegee in 1881 expecting a school, what did you find?
Why ask it
He found no building, no land and no equipment, only a state grant of $2,000 a year that could be spent on salaries alone. Classes began on July 4 with thirty students in a borrowed church and a shanty that leaked so badly a student held an umbrella over him during lessons.
Who was Lewis Adams, and would there have been a school without him?
Why ask it
Adams was a formerly enslaved tinsmith in Tuskegee who is credited with trading Black votes for a legislator's promise of a school, and he sat on its first board. Short biographies tend to skip him, so a report that asks about him has already gone a step past the usual one.
Why did you insist the students make the bricks and raise the buildings themselves?
Why ask it
Three kilns failed in a row, and he pawned his watch to pay for a fourth, which held. Some students and parents objected that they had come to study, not to dig clay, so have him answer them and not just you.
Every teacher at Tuskegee was Black, which was not true at Hampton. Was that meant as a statement?
Why ask it
It is an easy detail to miss, and it changes how the school looks: a campus run entirely by Black staff in Alabama in the 1880s made an argument that no speech of his ever stated outright. A sharp follow-up is whether any donor or neighbor objected.
What did Olivia Davidson do for the school that people forget?
Why ask it
She arrived a few weeks after opening as lady principal, raised money through suppers and festivals in town and from Northern donors, and later married him; she died in 1889. That left him widowed twice before he was thirty-five, which belongs in any honest portrait of those building years.
Why did you teach the toothbrush alongside arithmetic?
Why ask it
'The gospel of the tooth-brush' was General Armstrong's phrase, and Washington made it part of the Tuskegee creed, along with bathing, sleeping between sheets and keeping a room. Some readers hear condescension and others hear a man passing on what he had to learn himself at Hampton, so give him room to answer both.
Why did you bring George Washington Carver to Tuskegee in 1896?
Why ask it
Carver came from Iowa to head the agriculture department, and the two had an uneven working relationship: Washington admired the teaching and research and complained about the paperwork. The question also keeps the two men apart in your report, since they are easy to blur into one.
What did the farmers who came to your yearly conference tell you that you had not known?
Why ask it
From 1892 he invited local farmers, many of them tenants deep in debt, onto the campus to talk about land, crops and schools, and later a wagon carried demonstrations out to their fields. Phrase it as what he learned, not what he taught, and you will get a less polished answer.
You were away raising money for months at a time. Who ran Tuskegee while you were gone?
Why ask it
The honest list includes his third wife Margaret Murray Washington, his brother John, the treasurer Warren Logan and his secretary Emmett Scott, with Washington directing by letter and telegram. It is the cure for the lone-founder story, and it opens the matter of what the travel cost his three children.
What did you expect a Tuskegee graduate to do in the first year back home?
Why ask it
The school began by training teachers, and his hope was that each graduate would carry a trade and a classroom into a rural county that had neither. His whole theory of progress is in the answer: built from the bottom, one community at a time.
Atlanta speech
How did a Black school principal come to be on the opening-day platform at the Atlanta exposition in 1895?
Why ask it
He had gone to Washington with a delegation to help win federal money for the Cotton States Exposition, and its directors then invited him to speak on September 18. He wrote afterward that on the way there he felt like a man going to the gallows, which is a good place to begin.
What did you mean by 'cast down your bucket where you are'?
Why ask it
The line comes from his story of a ship dying of thirst that is told to lower its bucket, and finds it is sitting in fresh water off the mouth of the Amazon. He aimed it twice, at Black Southerners to build where they stood and at white employers to hire them instead of looking to immigrants, and most reports catch only the first.
You told the Atlanta crowd there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. Was that praise for the farmer or a warning to the poet?
Why ask it
His next sentence was 'It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top', which is his case for trade schooling in one line. Test it against a real poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote the words of the Tuskegee school song in 1906, so Washington plainly had a use for poems.
You held up your hand and said the races could be as separate as the fingers in social matters. Did you believe it, or was it the price of being heard?
Why ask it
The line ends 'yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress', and the hall cheered it. Du Bois and other critics later gave the address the name it still carries, the Atlanta Compromise. Whichever way you have him answer, back it with something he did afterward, not only with something he said.
Who were you really speaking to that afternoon?
Why ask it
Three audiences heard or read the address: white Southerners, Northern visitors with money to invest, and Black Southerners. Make him name one sentence written for each. His reminder that Black workers had built the South's railroads without strikes, for example, was meant for employers and investors.
The speech made you famous within days. Did you want to be the spokesman for a whole people?
Why ask it
Newspapers across the country printed the address, President Cleveland wrote to congratulate him, and Harvard gave him an honorary degree the next year. Frederick Douglass had died that February, so the press was looking for a single Black leader to quote, and the question is whether he sought the part or was handed it.
Eight months later the Supreme Court approved 'separate but equal' in Plessy v. Ferguson. Did your speech make that ruling easier?
Why ask it
Critics have drawn a line from one to the other, while his defenders point out that segregation laws were already spreading and that he wrote none of them. Have him answer, then say in your own voice whether you are convinced.
What did you want to say in Atlanta and leave out?
Why ask it
The address is nearly silent on lynching and on the vote. Within a few years he published open letters against lynching and against Louisiana's plan to test Black voters but not white ones, so he had views he chose not to voice that day.
Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois congratulated you on the Atlanta speech. When did the two of you stop being allies?
Why ask it
Du Bois wrote to praise the address in 1895, and for some years the two discussed his coming to work at Tuskegee. The open break came in 1903 with his essay 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others', so asking for a date stops your report from treating them as enemies from the start.
Du Bois wrote that you asked Black Americans to give up political power, civil rights and higher education. Is that a fair summary of what you asked?
Why ask it
That three-part charge is the core of the 1903 essay, and it includes the words 'at least for the present'. Make him take the three one at a time, because his answer on the vote would not be his answer on colleges.
What is wrong with the idea of a Talented Tenth?
Why ask it
Du Bois argued that a college-trained minority would lead everyone else upward, where Washington put the farmer and the tradesman first. Press him with his own household: his third wife was a Fisk graduate and his daughter Portia studied at Northern schools.
Why did William Monroe Trotter's interruption in Boston in 1903 anger you so much?
Why ask it
Trotter, a Harvard graduate who edited the Boston Guardian, stood up at a church meeting and fired hostile questions at him until the evening broke up in disorder, and was jailed for a month over it. Listen for whether your Washington thinks that month in jail was deserved: it shows how he dealt with dissent from other Black leaders.
People called your web of newspapers, jobs and donors the Tuskegee Machine. Did you use it against your critics?
Why ask it
His surviving letters show money going to friendly Black newspapers and a close watch kept on opponents' meetings. Admirers find this the hardest part of the record, and an interview with no question like it reads as a tribute.
While you told audiences to be patient, you quietly paid for lawsuits against laws that kept Black men from voting. Why keep that secret?
Why ask it
He financed the Alabama voting case Giles v. Harris in 1903, handling the arrangements through his secretary in coded letters, and later backed a challenge to forced labor for debt. It became widely known only when historians read his papers, and it changes how the Atlanta speech reads, so ask it after the Atlanta questions and not before.
What did Du Bois see clearly that you did not?
Why ask it
Turning the argument around tests whether your Washington can concede anything, and a figure who concedes something sounds like a person. Du Bois helped found the NAACP in 1909 and lived until 1963, so you can weigh which man's methods the later civil rights movement used, and whether it borrowed from both.
Presidents and donors
What happened when you dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in October 1901?
Why ask it
He ate with the president and his family at the White House about a month after Roosevelt took office, and Southern newspapers and politicians answered with fury. Ask what the reaction taught him about how far the bargain he offered in Atlanta would actually stretch.
Presidents asked your advice on whom to appoint. What did you do with that power?
Why ask it
Roosevelt and Taft both consulted him on federal jobs in the South, for Black officeholders especially. The follow-up that matters is whether anyone was passed over for having disagreed with him.
In 1906 Roosevelt dismissed 167 Black soldiers after the shooting in Brownsville, Texas. You urged him in private not to. Why did you never say so in public?
Why ask it
The men were discharged without a trial, and the Army did not reverse the finding until 1972. His public silence cost him support among Black Americans, which makes this the clearest test of his method: influence behind a closed door against protest in the open.
How did you go about asking Andrew Carnegie for money?
Why ask it
Carnegie paid for the campus library, which students built, and in 1903 gave the endowment $600,000 in bonds. Washington wrote that he avoided begging and simply set out the facts, so ask him for one rule a school fundraiser could borrow.
Did depending on wealthy white donors change what you were willing to say out loud?
Why ask it
Carnegie, Rockefeller, the railroad man William Baldwin and others kept Tuskegee solvent, and his critics said the money bought his moderation. He might point to the buildings and ask what else would have paid for them; your report should let both stand and then choose.
What were you and Julius Rosenwald trying to do with those small country schoolhouses?
Why ask it
Rosenwald, who ran Sears, joined the Tuskegee board in 1912, and the two began with six schools in rural Alabama where each community had to raise part of the cost. The program grew to thousands of schools across the South after Washington died, so he saw only the start of what may be his most lasting work.
Looking back
Up from Slavery is still in print. Who were you writing it for?
Why ask it
The book came out in 1901, was written with a hired assistant and was aimed partly at the Northern readers who funded the school, which explains its steady cheerfulness. Follow with what a chapter written only for his own children would have added, and you have shown that you treat an autobiography as a source with a purpose.
In your last year you wrote more bluntly against segregation laws. Had your mind changed, or only your tone?
Why ask it
An article of his attacking residential segregation ordinances appeared in The New Republic weeks after he died, and in 1915 he also opposed the film The Birth of a Nation. By then the Wilson administration had segregated federal offices and his White House access was gone, so ask whether losing influence freed him to speak.
When doctors in New York told you that you were dying, you asked for the train home to Alabama. Why?
Why ask it
He reached Tuskegee and died there the next morning, November 14, 1915, at fifty-nine, and he is buried on the campus. His reported reason was that he had been born in the South, had worked there and meant to be buried there, which says a good deal about a man who could have settled anywhere in the North.
The monument at Tuskegee shows you lifting a veil from a kneeling man. Some say you are lowering it. Which is it?
Why ask it
The statue went up in 1922, and the narrator of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, looking at one like it, cannot decide which way the veil is moving. It is the entire debate about him in a single image, and it suits an older class better than a young one.
The school you opened in a borrowed church is now Tuskegee University. What would you make of it?
Why ask it
It now grants degrees in fields such as engineering and veterinary medicine, the kind of higher study his critics said he undervalued. Does that prove him right that the foundation had to come first, or prove Du Bois right about where it needed to go?
A dinner at the White House caused an uproar in 1901. What would you say to a country that has since elected a Black president?
Why ask it
Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, a hundred and seven years after that dinner. A Washington who only celebrates is out of character: he measured progress in land owned, businesses opened and schools built, so let him ask how those figures look now. Mark the whole answer as your inference.
Which would you tell a sixteen-year-old to get first today, a trade or a degree?
Why ask it
Families still have this argument over apprenticeships, college costs and what a diploma is worth, so it is his dispute with Du Bois in modern clothes. Make him advise one particular student, and label the answer as your inference, since he never saw the choices that student has.
Would you give the Atlanta speech again, word for word?
Why ask it
A verdict question with three defensible answers: yes, because it bought twenty years of school-building; no, because the cost was too high; or yes in 1895 and no by 1915. Pick one and support it with a single event from after the speech.
What do you want students to remember about you besides the argument with Du Bois?
Why ask it
He is usually taught as one half of a debate, which leaves out the brickyard, the farmers' conferences and the country schools. For a closing fact, he was the first Black American pictured on a United States postage stamp, issued in 1940.
Interviewing Booker T. Washington for a class assignment
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you write the interview
Read him before you question him
Two texts do most of the work: the Atlanta address, which is short enough to read in one sitting, and the opening chapters of Up from Slavery. A question written after reading them names a place, a person or a year, and that is the difference between this assignment and a list that could be put to anybody born before 1900.
Decide which year he is answering from
The Washington of 1895 has just become famous. The one of 1903 is under attack from Du Bois and Trotter, and the one of 1915 has lost his line to the White House and is writing more bluntly. Pick a date for the interview, put it at the top of the page, and do not let him know anything that happened later unless you are in the Looking back group, where the pretense is dropped on purpose.
Choose about ten and keep them in order
Nobody is expected to ask all fifty, and the number an assignment wants varies, so check yours. Take one or two from each group so the conversation still walks through his life, and make sure your ten include something from the Du Bois group and one question he would prefer not to be asked, such as Brownsville or the secret lawsuits.
Check what your teacher wants handed in
Some assignments want only the questions, some want his answers written out, and some want it performed with a partner. Ask before you start, along with how sources should be cited, because the same research is laid out very differently for each.
Writing the answers he would give
Borrow his habits of speech
He liked a short story with a point, plain words and a joke at his own expense, and in public he rarely attacked an opponent by name. Answers built the same way sound like him. A paragraph of open fury at Du Bois does not, however satisfying it is to write.
Mark what is his and what is yours
Sort every sentence of an answer into three kinds: something he wrote or said, which gets a source; something he did, which gets a date; and something you are inferring. Flag the third kind with a phrase such as 'I think he would have said', above all in the questions about the present.
Put the private letters on the table
In public he counseled patience, and in private he was paying lawyers to fight disfranchisement. Ask the public question first, let him give the platform answer, then bring up Giles v. Harris. The distance between those two replies is the strongest material this interview has.
Give Du Bois his best case
Read the 1903 essay itself before writing that group. It credits Washington's achievements at some length before it criticizes him, and it is courteous throughout. An interview that turns Du Bois into a jealous rival, or Washington into a sellout, has taken a shortcut the sources do not support.
Slips that turn up in reports on him
Events from after 1915
He died in November 1915. The government syphilis study carried out around Tuskegee began in 1932, and the Tuskegee Airmen trained in the 1940s, so he cannot be asked to explain or defend either one. A question in the last group may ask what he would think of them, as long as the answer is labeled as your guess.
Carver is a different man
Washington founded the school and ran it for thirty-four years. George Washington Carver arrived in 1896 to teach agriculture and did the plant research he is known for. If a peanut appears in your Washington interview, something has been mixed up.
Quotations with no source
Many lines travel under his name on posters and quotation sites. Up from Slavery and the Atlanta address are in the public domain and can be searched in full, so if a sentence cannot be found in either, or in another book or speech of his, leave it out of his mouth.
The words of his time
His writing uses 'Negro' and 'colored' as the ordinary respectful terms of the period. Keep his wording exact inside quotation marks, use present-day terms in your own sentences, and ask your teacher how they want the older words handled when the interview is read aloud.
If you are the teacher setting it
Run it as a press conference
One student answers as Washington, with notes allowed, and everyone else is a reporter with one question and one follow-up. Hand out points of view in advance: a reporter briefed by Du Bois, a Southern newspaper editor, a Tuskegee student, a Northern donor. The follow-ups are where the reading shows.
Seat Du Bois in the next chair
Two students take the same five questions, one as each man, and write their answers without conferring. Compare them aloud and list where the two agree, for instance that schooling mattered and that lynching was an evil, before listing where they split. The agreements usually surprise a class more than the quarrel does.
Grade the evidence, not the costume
A workable rubric asks three things of every answer: that it rests on a dated event or a cited passage, that inference is flagged as inference, and that somewhere in the interview Washington concedes a weakness. A convincing accent earns nothing on its own.