BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

Washington (1856-1915) was born into slavery as Booker Taliaferro in Franklin County, Virginia. His mother was the plantation's cook, and his white father had nothing to do with him. Both mother and siblings were liberated by the Union army in 1865, and after the war moved to West Virginia, where Booker had to work in salt mines in the morning and evening make up for earnings lost while he was in school during the day. It was in school that he added his famous last name. In 1872 he set out for Hampton Institute, having to beg and walk 80 miles and getting there bedraggled and penniless. After the institute’s officials tested him by having him clean a room, he was admitted and given work as a janitor. Washington studied brick masonry along with collegiate courses and graduated in 1876. After becoming disenchanted with classical education, he became convinced that practical, manual training in rural skills and crafts would save his people, not higher learning divorced from the reality of the black man's downtrodden existence. In 1879 he went back to Hampton Institute to supervise 100 Native Americans admitted experimentally, his techniques proving a success during his tenure on the faculty. In 1881 the citizens in Tuskegee, Alabama, asked Hampton's president to recommend a white man to head their new black college, but he suggested Washington instead.

With only a little money and no faculty, facilities or students, Washington was left to do all the work. Putting his philosophy of education to the test, he and his students built a kiln and made the bricks with which they erected campus buildings. Washington led the Tuskegee Institute until 1915, improving not only the lot of his students but also that of poor black farmers and laborers. He founded the National Negro Business League in 1900, and by the time Washington relinquished his post, Tuskegee had 1,500 students and a larger endowment than any other black institution. In 1895 Washington gave his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech, renouncing agitation and protest tactics. He became a powerful black spokesman, having the deciding voice in Federal appointments of African Americans and in philanthropic grants to black institutions. Critics of his surrender of civil rights and his stressing of training in crafts to the neglect of liberal education founded the Niagara Movement in 1905, then its successor, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. His death in 1915 cleared the way for blacks to return to Frederick Douglass's tactics of agitating for equal political, social, and economic rights. Washington won a Harvard honorary degree in 1891, was the first African American man asked to dine with the President at the White House (1901), and was the first African American honored on a U.S. postage stamp (1940).

IDA B. WELLS

Wells(1862-1931) was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. When her parents died in 1880 as a result of yellow fever, Wells became a teacher in her home town in order to support her younger siblings. She was able to complete her studies at Rust College and in 1888 became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. As the editor and co-owner of a local black newspaper titled The Free Speech and Headlight, Wells used her paper to attack the evils of lynching and encouraged the black townsmen of Memphis to go west after a respected black store owner was lynched in 1892. Her own life in danger, she took her cause to England, earning a reputation as a fiery orator and courageous leader. Upon returning to the United States, she settled in Chicago and formed the first civic organization for African-American women. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney, and devoted her time to raising their children. With racial strife still common, Barnett was asked in 1909 to be a member of the committee to establish the groundwork for the organization now known as the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the country.