After his death, his older half-brother claimed to have seen the date April 5, 1856, recorded next to Washington’s name in a family Bible and 1856 is the year that appears on his headstone at his gravesite in Tuskegee. As Washington observes wryly in the opening paragraph of Up from Slavery, “I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time.” Possessing no formal birth certificate, he had to rely on the memories of others and make educated guesses himself, sometimes placing his birth as early as 1854 and other times as late as 1859. The precise year of his birth has been a matter of debate.

He was born into slavery on a tobacco farm near the tiny town of Hale’s Ford in Franklin County late in the 1850s. That Washington would come to symbolize such divergent ideas-that, indeed, he would become a nationally known symbol of anything at all-would have seemed almost unimaginable at the moment of his birth. Du Bois, acknowledged Washington’s status as both a racial and national leader, referring to him in 1903 as “the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions.” Yet Washington also continues to inspire ambivalent and sometimes hostile reactions for having been an “accommodationist”: one who, in order to gain a measure of economic success for African Americans in the former slave states, accepted segregation and refused to speak out loudly in favor of other forms of advancement, namely the pursuit of full legal, political, and social equality. president Theodore Roosevelt, who would later call Washington “one of the most useful citizens of our land.” Even his foremost critic, the African American writer and intellectual W.E.B. When Washington became the first African American to receive an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1896, a Boston newspaper ranked him among “our national benefactors.” When he became the first to dine at the White House in 1901, he did so at the invitation of U.S. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Washington was an exemplary American citizen, “a public man second to no other American in importance,” as the novelist William Dean Howells called him in 1901. The most famous of the several books he authored, coauthored, or edited during his lifetime, Up from Slavery (1901), has become a classic of American autobiography, drawing comparisons not only to earlier slave narratives but also to such texts as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. The tiny school he founded in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881 is now Tuskegee University, an institution that currently enrolls more than 3,000 students. Washington was an author, educator, orator, philanthropist, and, from 1895 until his death in 1915, the United States’ most famous African American.

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