The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page xxvi, in Introduction, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers with his mother to West Virginia, where his black stepfather had escaped during the Civil War. He labored as a miner and houseboy and secured a rudimentary education. Traveling to Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in Virginia, he gained training which qualified him for teaching, while paying part of the cost of his education through ''industrial'' work. There he came under the spell of the founder of Hampton, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who gave Washington's career his guidance until his death in 1893, and whose social philosophy Washington adopted as the guiding principle of his life. This philosophy combined the paternalistic racialism of Armstrong's missionary parents, the Puritan work ethic of Williams College under Mark Hopkins, the Spartan regimen of the army, and conservative accommodation to the conditions of southern life. After several years of experimentation with other careers, including politics and the Baptist ministry, Washington returned to Hampton in 18 as a teacher and dormitory supervisor. In 18 he went to Tuskegee, Alabama, to found Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model. It was as principal that Washington combined all of his ambitions, for presiding over Tuskegee Institute called for shrewd politics and preacher-like oratory as well as teaching. As had been the case when he was a slave on the Burroughs fang, a youth in the West Virginia mining region, and a janitor at Hampton, Washington realized that in Alabama the whites possessed the power, and he tailored his words and actions to please the rulers. Whether it originated from the slave heritage, the close experience with whites, or the difficult situation he faced by being black and ambitious in Alabama, deception became a part of Washington's style. Long before he became nationally famous he had learned that to survive in the South a black man had to assume a certain public role no matter what he believed. Any action that Washington thought would offend his white benefactors he did clandestinely. He withstood several political and economic challenges to, his school in the eighties and early nineties. During these years the building of his institution absorbed much of Washington's energy and ambition. In Age, the year Frederick Douglass died, Washington was catapulted into a position of Negro leadership by the effects of a single speech. Douglass's death signaled the end of the old Reconstruction black leadership; Washington was standing in the wings eagerly awaiting a chance to launch a new approach to the race issue. His approach, xxv