For the History Channel, I wrote about Booker T. Washington’s early life and legacy.
It’s now a National Monument, but the Franklin County, Virginia, plantation where Washington was born on April 5, 1856, was hardscrabble at best. Washington himself would later call the place “about as near to Nowhere as any locality can be.” Washington’s mother was an enslaved woman named Jane; his father was a white man whose identity Washington said he never knew. His owners were James and Elizabeth Burroughs, who had moved to the 207-acre tobacco farm in 1850. James and his sons worked in the fields alongside their slaves, and the farm was not particularly profitable. At the end of the Civil War, a Union soldier announced all the slaves on the Burroughs plantation were free. Jane, with 9-year-old Booker and his siblings, immediately moved her family to West Virginia.
The T. in Booker T. Washington stands for Taliaferro (locally pronounced “Tolliver”), a relatively common surname in Maryland and Virginia. The Taliaferro name itself can be traced to one Bartholomew Taliaferro, who immigrated to London from Venice in the 1560s. Its meaning in Italian is “iron-cutter.” Washington chose his own last name when he enrolled in his first school in Malden, West Virginia. His mother only allowed him to go to school after much begging and a commitment that he would work in a local salt works from 4:00-9:00 a.m. each morning before class.