Booker Taliaferro Washington Helped African Americans Gain...

As humans our species has a requirement for knowledge and we are a deeply curious in nature. This is how we have evolved and throughout time with new inventions and new ideals our primitive instincts changed some say for better and others say for the worst. Booker Taliaferro Washington helped African Americans gain the knowledge of literacy that was so long forbidden. Born to a cook for plantation and an ambiguous white man on April 5, 1856, he was just another face among a sea of discriminated,miserable, and oppressed people. Growing up in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, in most states prior to the Civil War, the child of a slave was born a slave. Although times were hard whether it was living in the small quarters with his sister, brother, and mother, hearing stories of his ancestors and the torture they endured, or not knowing or being able to console in his father. Washington found his comfort and peace through knowledge. He first discovered education after peeping throu gh the window of a school house near a plantation where he toted 100 pounds of cotton each day. From that moment he knew his calling and wanted to do what children in the school house were doing, but due to the fact it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. He had to go out and get it on his own. After the Civil War, Booker and his mother moved to Malden, West Virginia, where she married freeman Washington Ferguson. Sacrifices had to made being that his family was free but very poor,