"Booker Taliaferro Washington" was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community.

Washington was of the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants, who were newly oppressed by Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era/disfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Era (United States)/Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1895 his Atlanta compromise called for avoiding confrontation over segregation and instead putting more reliance on long-term educational and economic advancement in the black community.

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If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

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Character, not circumstances, make the man.

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Character is power.

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No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

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I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

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Success isn't measured by the position you reach in life: it's measured by the obstacles you overcome.

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Most leaders spend time trying to get others to think highlyof them, when instead they should try to get their people tothink more highly of themselves.It's wonderful when the people believe in their leader.It's more wonderful when the leader believes in their people!You can't hold a man down withoutstaying down with him.— Booker T. Washington.

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I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

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The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.

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One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

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Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

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Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

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Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

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There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

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I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high water mark of pure and useful living.

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