Up from slavery / Booker T. Washington ; with a new introduction by Ishmael Reed and a new afterword by Robert J. Norrell.

The autobiography of Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) who was born on a tobacco farm in Virginia, and enslaved from birth. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, his family moved to West Virginia where he worked in the mines while studying. Subsequently enrolling in the Hampton Institute, he later became a teacher there and went on to found the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school, in Alabama. He became recognised as a pioneer of black education in the United States and a critic of racism, becoming the first African-American to receive an honorary PhD from Harvard University.