Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community and of the contemporary black elite. Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

TO WOULD-BE TEACHERS: Since very many of you whom I see before me to-night will spend some part of your lives after you leave here as teachers, even if you do not make teaching your life work, I am going to talk over with you again a subject on which I have spoken elsewhere-How to build up a good school in the South.