Booker T. Washington Trivia Quiz

Answer: Taliaferro

Booker Taliaferro was born into slavery on the plantation of James Burroughs in 1856 in Hale's Ford, Virginia. It is not known who his father was. He was nine when the Emancipation proclamation was issued. His mother then took him to West Virginia to rejoin her husband, an escaped slave, whose name of "Washington" Booker took.

Answer: National Negro Business League

Founded in Boston in 1900, the league changed its name to the National Business League in 1960 and reincorporated in the nation's capital. Booker founded the league to promote both the financial and commercial development of African-Americans who were fighting discrimination in the decades following the Civil War. Andrew Carnegie helped to support the establishment of the league.

Answer: Up from Slavery

His first autobiography, "The Story of My Life and Work" was published in 1900. "Up from Slavery" was published in 1901, after being serialized in "The Outlook." In the book, Washington describes his efforts to achieve success despite his oppressive background.

He details his education and work establishing schools to help disadvantaged minorities. "Up from Slavery" was the best-selling African-American autobiography until Alex Haley published "The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley" in 1965.

Answer: False

In "Up from Slavery," he wrote, "Character, not circumstance, makes the person." He wrote also, "I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed."

Answer: Being good citizens and providing needed skills

Washington believed that the way to achieving acceptance in white society was for African-Americans to be reliable, responsible, and productive citizens. He advocated a slow approach to Civil Rights to avoid backlash from whites and rejected the idea that African-Americans should focus on the grievances they had experienced. In "Up from Slavery," he criticized "another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs."

He argued that his people would gain more supporters and converts by focusing on the good rather than on the bad: "I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done."

This is not to say Washington had no involvement in politics. He cultivated political connections and lobbied governments to support education for African-Americans. He was also able to secure the support of many rich white philanthropists, who helped fund his educational projects. But his focus was on "racial uplift" through entrepreneurship and education instead of on directly challenging disenfranchisement of African-American voters or the Jim Crow segregation of the South.

Answer: Tuskegee

Washington attended Hampton Institute. In 1881, at the age of 25, he was recommended to serve at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which would eventually become Tuskegee University. In 1882, Washington bought a former plantation to create a permanent home for the school, and his students physically built the school themselves.

He led the school for over three decades, and his final resting place is at the cemetery at Tuskegee University.

Answer: Writing a poem

Washington wrote this in "Up from Slavery." Though a well-educated intellectual himself, at Tuskegee and throughout his life, he emphasized the importance of African-Americans obtaining marketable skills so that they could pull themselves up from impoverished circumstances. "Excellence," he wrote, "is to do a common thing in an uncommon way."

Answer: Three

Booker T. Washington's first wife was Fannie N. Smith, whom he married in 1882. She was from the same west Virginia town he moved to at the age of nine, and he met her when she was a student at Malden school, where he taught. She died two years after they were married. Next, in 1885, he married Olivia A. Davidson, who worked as a teacher at Tuskegee. Washington made her vice-principal of the school.

In 1893, once again a widower, Booker married Margaret James Murray. His third wife outlived him.

Answer: Theodore Roosevelt

The invitation was extended by the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt in October of 1901 and was the first time an African-American was publicly invited on equal terms by a sitting president. Roosevelt's invitation was viciously criticized by Southern Democratic Party leaders.

Answer: W.E.B. Du Bois

Washington received strong criticism from other black Civil Rights leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, for what they saw as his policy of racial accommodation. In 1895, Washington worked out what was called "the Atlanta compromise" between African-American leaders and Southern white leaders. Essentially, the unwritten compromise was that African-Americans in the South would submit to white political rule and refrain from demanding integration provided the Southern whites guaranteed them a basic education and due process.

Although W. E. B. Du Bois supported the compromise at first, he later rejected it. Du Bois wrote, "As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: 1. The disfranchisement of the Negro. 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro."