Booker T. Washington Booker T. Washington was born on April 5,1856. Born a slave he rose to become the commonly recognized leader of the African American race in America. For the first nine years of his life until 1865 when the close of the Civil War eemancipated the boy Booker and the remainder of his race, he like many other Americans of dark skin had been considered a peice of property on a Southern plantation. Any formal education had been forbidden to most blacks in the South. By 1895 in his historic Atlanta Exposition Address, Washington said : "Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkin