Up from Slavery Paperback – by Booker T. Washington

The 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery chronicles his work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the Hampton Institute, to his work establishing vocational schools - most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama - to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills, and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. A controversial figure in his own time, Washington's Up from Slavery consistently ranks in the top 50 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.