Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington

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⭐ 9.0/10

(Originally written by Magdalene)

I pretty much didn't know anything about Booker T. Washington going in to his autobiography, except that he was Black and helped Black people. I just didn't know how. I think that made it especially cool to see how he went from a slave to getting an honourary degree from Harvard.

The main thing that surprised me about his book was how positive he was about everything. He mentions over and over again that although he's obviously against slavery, he doesn't really feel any anger towards white people, and in fact constantly highlights how good and kind and helpful so many white people were. This was one of the reasons why he was so controversial, but man, why was he being so nice to us??

I was also so impressed with his drive to just learn and get educated (a true Ravenclaw) just for the sake of learning. And then his passion and hard work that he put into helping as many Black people get educated as he could. The man was non-stop!

One gut-punch moment was when he said that after KKK was gotten rid of, he was glad that he couldn't imagine anything so terrible every happening again, and there's no way a group like the KKK could exist again. Oh honey, I sure hope you're not aware of what's happening in 2020.

I felt like I got a lot of insight into what the States were like just after slavery. I'm still a little confused about why he made it sound like barely anything bad happened again after the end of slavery, but I'm glad he was optimistic.

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