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Booker T Washington Quotes

Browse 4 quotes about Booker T Washington.

Booker T Washington Quotes

“A whole people's tumble into raw, untested century began with one man, penning his serpentine sojourn up from slavery-- I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but ... I must have been born somewhere and at some time. He began as another baby shoved directly into the wrong air.”

“Between the tenets of those two men [W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington], a race strived to untangle its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.”

“[Booker T. Washington's] doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs. The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?”