Booker T Wash

Dayna Bozeman

January 26, 2016

History 115

                                        Discussion Questions

1. What was Booker’s childhood like? He didn’t have a normal childhood. He lived with his family as a slave in a little cabin on a farm. There was very limited space, so it was hard to do anything.
2. What did he think about slavery? He did not like being a slave. He just wanted to be a normal kid that went to school like other white kids.
3. What did Booker most want to do as a boy? He wanted to go to school when he was growing up.

1. How did he measure success? He said “Success to measure not so much by the position that has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”

1. What did he learn while working for Mrs. Viola Ruffner, the wife of the salt furnace/ coal mine owner? While staying with Mrs. Ruffner, she taught him to have a strong work ethic which turned him into a hard working person.
2. What was Booker’s “test” to enter Hampton Institute? He had to clean the school and the “test” was to see how good of a job he did after the job he was completed of cleaning the school.
3. How did he pay for his education? After he was done the “test”, he was hired as a janitor for the school to help him pay for tuition.
4. What did he learn at Hampton? He learn at Hampton to write and read. He also learned public speaking and used it as a tool for becoming a teacher back home.
5. Booker criticized freedmen because of their views on education. What were these views? Most former slaves did not have the money to go to school, so they was not interested in getting the money to go. He criticized their efforts of trying to be successful people.
6. What fault did he find with the federal government in its handling of freedmen during Reconstruction? During Reconstruction, former slaves and many small white farmers became trapped in a new system known as sharecropping. In exchange for land, a cabin, and supplies sharecroppers agreed to raise a cash crop and give half the crop to their landlord. High interests rates charged for goods bought on credit transformed sharecropping into a system of economic dependency and poverty. Most of the slaves that took place in this sharecropping ended up in debt because they couldn't keep up with the taxes of the land.

1. What were Booker’s first teaching jobs? He taught back home in Wayland, teaching Sunday school. He taught at Hampton Institute.
2. What insight into post-Reconstruction American racial attitudes (“the curious workings of caste America”) does Booker provide in retelling the story of his life and experiences?
3. When he began Tuskegee, what did he learn his students to learn? He wanted them to have strong ethnic, and be prepared for the real world after graduated. He made all of his students who did not have any tuition funds to work 10 hours a day at school and 2 hours at night just like he did when he attend there.
4. What did he think southern blacks must do to succeed? They need to work just a harder than an average white man in the south to succeed during the school year before and after school.
5. What rules did Booker follow concerning giving public speeches? He made separate preparation. He tries to make his audience feel
6. Did Booker oppose higher education for blacks?
7. How did he feel about those who were prejudiced?
8. Did he believe suffrage alone uplift blacks?
9. What was Booker’s main purpose in his Atlanta Exposition speech in 1895?
10. How did Booker define happiness and misery?
11. How did he believe political rights would be achieved by southern blacks?

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