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This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one up from slavery.

He was an old black man and I was an old white man. We were both native Angelinos and had been just about old enough to drive around the time of the Watts riots in 1965.

But that was half a century in a lifetime ago, and we hadn't known one another. Los Angeles is a big place, home to many

worlds. Now we were white-haired professors reading a book together and we became friends. His name was Kimasi. We were

spending a week with a dozen other academics reading Booker T Washington's

autobiography up from slavery. Booker T. Washington's autobiography up from slavery.

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, just a few years before the Civil

War began.

With heroic determination, he got himself an education

and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama,

where he remained principal for the rest of his life.

By the time Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Washington was with no

comparison the most well-known and influential black American living. By the beginning

of the 20th century, as a biographer would write, he was one of the most powerful men in the United States.

Up from slavery, published in 1901, sold a hundred thousand copies before Washington died in

...