When I was a boy, back before the civil rights movement, I had a small set of books that told brief biographies of famous heroes, such as Helen Keller, Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Florence Nightingale, and Thomas Edison.

    Another name on the spine was that of a black man named Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). What could possibly have placed him in that glorious company? He was an educator.

    He was born in slavery on a Virginia plantation five years before the start of the American Civil War (1861), seven years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation declared that slaves in the rebellious Southern states "are, and henceforward shall be free" (1863) and nine years before the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, abolishing slavery (1865).

    Once free, Booker's family (he had no last name at the time, having been fathered by an unknown white man) left for West Virginia, where his mother's common-law husband had fled. There, around age 9 or 10, the illiterate boy began to teach himself to read and write. When he enrolled in a local school, he was asked his surname. On the spot he took "Washington," his step-father's first name, as his last name.

    He worked hard, including in a coal mine, to save money for college, and enrolled at Hampton Institute, a school for freedmen, where he continued to work and pay for his studies. After graduation, when Washington was just 25, the president of Hampton recommended him as leader of a new teacher's training college in Alabama, the Tuskegee Institute.

    The college began in a church, and the next year Washington purchased land and oversaw the building of structures, the labor being performed by the students. Courses included both practical studies and academics. To fund the school's growth, he developed relationships with wealthy northern philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and George Eastman.

    Washington led the Tuskegee Institute for the rest of his life, until his death at age 59.

    Vocabulary: Which word above means:

    1. from now on

    2. eliminating, getting rid of

    3. a campaign for equal rights for blacks

    4. people who were formerly slaves

    5. large farm, worked by laborers

    6. family name

    7. edge of a book

    8. approved, validated

    9. large donors to good causes

    10. established by unwritten custom

    ANSWERS: 1. henceforward 2. abolishing 3. civil rights movement 4. freedmen 5. plantation 6. surname 7. spine 8. ratified 9. philanthropists 10. common-law