How Did Booker T Washington Create A Lack Of Industrial Education

In 1856, Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, and became a social advocate for the industrial education of Blacks after slavery. He believed that industrial education would lead to economic change in Black communities and bring them upward mobility in America. In Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, Washington continuously experienced the obstacles Blacks faced while trying to receive an education, like the poverty they faced in their communities and the inefficient resources to build schools, which formed his ideology of advocating for an industrial education for Blacks because he believed that an industrial education would free Blacks from poverty in the United States. Booker T. Washington

The lack of allocated money by the state to build Black schools shows that Blacks faced obstacles to increase their social mobility through education because Blacks had nowhere to go to obtain their education. The underfunding of black schools was due to Jim Crow laws in Alabama, whereby Blacks were systematically discriminated against because they were made to have separate schools that received less money and materials from the state than white schools in Tuskegee. However, Washington solved the problem of no schools in Tuskegee by using Black churches to teach students in, but the poverty of the churches, including poor heating, underpaid teachers, and lack of resources, stunted Washington’s ability to teach Black students to the best of his ability. The poverty in Black communities, combined with the lack of funding from the state, impacted the quality of education that Blacks received because they lacked

Du Bois that advocated for a liberal arts education. Washington advocated for industrial education because in the 1870s and 1880s the Southern U.S. was going through industrialization, therefore he believed that if Blacks could enter the workforce in factories and industries then they could make money and climb out of the widespread poverty that they faced in the Southern U.S. Washington explains his plan of industrial education when he states, “My plan was not to teach them to work the old way, but to show them how to make the forces of nature - air, water, steam, electricity, horse-power, and assist them in their labour”, which shows that Washington’s ideology of industrial education was to modernize the Black community so they would be up to date with modern labour techniques, rather than poor and older ideas. Hugh Hawkins argues that Washington’s advocacy of industrial education raised Blacks from their knees and taught them that they could strike off their chains of economic slavery and win the respect and cooperation of their white neighbours. Washington believed that industrial education was important because he noticed that in the town of Tuskegee, Blacks faced economic hardship whereby “families lived in one room, their eating habits were limited to corn bread, even though the land around them could