I checked the Wikipedia article on Booker T. My slideshow recorded his lifespan as 1856 to 1915. But my attention focused on this: “the year was 1858 or 1859.” I had just made a short slideshow on Washington’s life, highlighting his leadership at the Tuskegee Institute and his fundraising prowess, how he helped erect thousands of Black schools in the rural South. The passage is both droll (“I must have been born somewhere and at some time”) and sobering-he does not have this information because he was born as someone else’s legal property, not as a citizen. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. Washington begins his memoir by admitting ignorance about what is usually a key piece of biographical information: when he was born. I was faced with a question that took a few solid hours to answer, admittedly not a great example of time management on my part but such excursions are the work of history. Washington’s autobiography as an undergrad. The first paragraph, actually-something I didn’t notice when I first read Booker T. I needed to reread Up from Slavery for the ninth-grade American history class I teach, but I got stuck on the first page.
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