Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery on April 5, 1856. His mother, Jane, was an enslaved Black woman, and his father a white man whose identity remains unknown. Booker and his mother lived and worked on the estate of James T. and Elizabeth Burroughs in Franklin County, Virginia. In 1860, Jane married an enslaved man named Washington Ferguson, who left his small family after the outbreak of the Civil War to escape to West Virginia. After the war and the application of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the nine-year-old Booker and his mother made their way to Malden, West Virginia, where they joined Ferguson. Here, Booker contributed to his household income by packing salt, working in a coal mine, and finally as a servant to the mine owner’s wife. He also attended school, and it was then—for the purpose of registering for school—that he adopted his stepfather’s first name as his last name.

When he reached the age of 15, Washington walked and hitchhiked back to Virginia to attend the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) for freed Black people. The principal was General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, commander of Black troops during the Civil War, and he implemented a program at Hampton combining moral education with agricultural training, a combination that he believed could best support his recently freed students.