Booker T. WashingtonAmerican educator, novelist, orator, and advisor to multiple presidents of the United States were Booker Taliaferro Washington. As the son of an African-American slave named Jane, Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856. His faily relocated to West Virginia after emancipation. He completed his studies at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute while he was young (now Hampton University). Washington spent several years earning money in West Virginia by working in coal mines and salt furnaces. He traveled east to Hampton Institute, a Virginia institution founded to provide education for freedmen and their descendants, where he also took a job to help pay for his studies. Later, in 1878, he enrolled in Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. Washington had three marriages. He acknowledged the efforts made by all three of his wives at Tuskegee in his memoirs Up from Slavery. After receiving a diagnosis of Bright's illness, Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, passed away in 1915 at the age of 59. The illness was kidney inflammation, now known as nephritis. On November 14, 1915, soon after midnight, he boarded a train from New York to Tuskegee, where he passed away a few hours later. On November 17, 1915, he was buried, and close to 8,000 people showed up there. Read More Read Less