Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans like "cast down your buckets," which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans' success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
作者简介: WILLIAM L. ANDREWS is E. Maynard Adams Professor of En-glish at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro- American Autobiography, 1760-1865(1986). He has edited more than a dozen volumes relating to African American lit-erature, among thein Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (1986), Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1987), and Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (1994-). He is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1997), and The Oxford Companion to African American Lit-erature(1997). |
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