Armstrong, soon discovered the hardworking Washington and offered him a scholarship, sponsored by a white man. The school's founder and headmaster, General Samuel C.

He convinced administrators to let him attend the school and took a job as a janitor to help pay his tuition. Along the way, he took odd jobs to support himself. In 1872, Washington left home and walked 500 miles to Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia. Over the two years he worked for her, she understood his desire for an education and allowed him to go to school for an hour a day during the winter months. But she saw something in Washington - his maturity, intelligence and integrity - and soon warmed up to him.

Ruffner was known for being very strict with her servants, especially boys. In 1866, Washington got a job as a houseboy for Viola Ruffner, the wife of coal mine owner Lewis Ruffner. At about this time, Washington took the first name of his stepfather as his last name, Washington. Because he was still working, he got up nearly every morning at 4 a.m. Washington's mother noticed his interest in learning and got him a book from which he learned the alphabet and how to read and write basic words. The family was very poor, and nine-year-old Washington went to work in the nearby salt furnaces with his stepfather instead of going to school. He wanted to do what those children were doing, but he was enslaved, and it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write.Īfter the Civil War, Washington and his mother moved to Malden, West Virginia, where she married freedman Washington Ferguson. Washington's first exposure to education was from the outside of a schoolhouse near the plantation looking inside, he saw children his age sitting at desks and reading books. Toting 100-pound sacks was hard work for a small boy, and he was beaten on occasion for not performing his duties satisfactorily. Washington and his mother lived in a one-room log cabin with a large fireplace, which also served as the plantation’s kitchen.Īt an early age, Washington went to work carrying sacks of grain to the plantation’s mill. His father was an unknown white man, most likely from a nearby plantation. Washington's mother, Jane, worked as a cook for plantation owner James Burroughs. In Franklin County, Virginia, as in most states prior to the Civil War, the child of an enslaved person also became enslaved. Early Lifeīorn to an enslaved person on April 5, 1856, Washington's life had little promise early on. Du Bois over the best avenues for racial uplift. A political adviser and writer, Washington clashed with intellectual W.E.B. In 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama (now known as Tuskegee University), which grew immensely and focused on training African Americans in agricultural pursuits. Washington put himself through school and became a teacher after the Civil War.

Du bois biography of a race