Booker T Washington Quotes

“We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.”
― Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work

“The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.”
― Booker T. Washington, The Man Farthest Down: A Record Of Observation And Study In Europe

“[Booker T. Washington's] doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“A whole people's tumble into raw, untested century began
with one man, penning his serpentine sojourn up from slavery--
I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth,
but ... I must have been born somewhere and at some time.
He began as another baby shoved directly into the wrong air.”
― Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Between the tenets of those two men [W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington], a race strived to untangle
its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled
toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.”
― Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Booker dreamed
of making friends with words,
setting free the secrets
that lived in books.”
― Jabari Asim, Fifty Cents and a Dream: Young Booker T. Washington