![]() Viola Ruffner, whose husband, General Ruffner, owned the salt furnace and coal mine. However, Washington did not have enough money to pay for tuition, so he took a job as a house servant with Mrs. Young Washington’s newly gained literacy inspired in him a thirst for education, a thirst that would drive him away from the salt mines and toward the Hampton Institute, a recently established school for black Americans. After long days of toil, often starting as early as 4 am, Washington would come home and teach himself how to read using an old copy of a Webster’s “blueback” reader that his mother had given him. Faced with no money, no resources, and no education, Washington was forced to work in the salt-mines at the age of 10. ![]() However, the difficulty of Washington’s early life did not end with his Emancipation. This forced labor came to an end upon Emancipation in 1865, and his mother moved the family to meet her husband ( Washington’s stepfather), an escaped slave, in West Virginia. On the plantation, Washington was subjected to hard labor every day as a young child and performed tasks like cleaning the yard, bringing water to the slaves in the field, and delivering corn to be milled. Washington begins his autobiography by describing the squalor of his childhood as a slave in Franklin County, VA. ![]() ![]() Washington, one of America’s most famous conservative educational philosophers, recounts his rise from slavery to establish the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school for black Americans. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |