ABOUT THIS BOOK

Here is the first of fifteen volumes in a project C. Vann Woodward called "the single most important research enterprise now under way in the field of American black history."

Volume 1 contains Washington's Up from Slavery, one of the most widely read American autobiographies, in addition to The Story of My Life and Work, and six other autobiographical writings. Together, the selections provide readers with a first step toward understanding Washington and his immense impact. These writings reveal the moral values he absorbed from his mid-nineteenth-century experiences and teachers. As importantly, they present him to the world as he wished to be seen: as the black version of the American success hero and an exemplar of the Puritan work ethic that he believed to be the secret of his success. These works, along with so much of Washington's writing, served as a model for many black Americans striving to overcome poverty and prejudice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Louis R. Harlan is professor of history at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (1958), and Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (1972). John W. Blassingame is assistant professor of history and acting chairman of Afro-American Studies at Yale University. He is editor of New Perspectives on Black Studies (1971) and author of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the American South (1972).

REVIEWS

"A major event by any standards. At long last friends, critics, and even enemies of Washington can see him only as his papers can reveal him. . . . In the papers we can find confirmations of our various opinions of him, but we can also find surprises in the life and views of a man that too few of his contemporaries really knew and understood."--John Hope Franklin, University of Chicago

"An extraordinary set of papers, not just for Negro history but for the history of the early twentieth century. Washington has an incredibly large correspondence with important scholars, philanthropists, and politicians of his age, and the publication will be an enormous service to scholars."--Kenneth M. Stampp, University of California

"Louis Harlan is an extraordinary able scholar and certainly one of the most perceptive and thoughtful historians working in the field of Negro history. . . . The undertaking is going to be one of the truly distinguished editorial contributions of our generation."--Dewey Grantham, Vanderbilt University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Story of My Life and Work, 1900 1
Up from Slavery, 1901 211
A Letter to the Editors of the Southern Workman, September 28, 1895 389
"Early Life and Struggle for an Education," October 1899 392
"Christmas Days in Old Virginia," December 1907 394
An Extract from "The Privilege of Service," December 1907 398
Extracts from The Story of the Negro, 1909 400
Extracts from My Larger Education, 1911 418
Index 459