Booker Taliaferro Washington slept outside with the farm animals on the tobacco farm above or crowded in with many other slaves and enslaved children on rag-covered dirt floors. His price was recorded, but no birthday. When Lincoln freed all slaves forever, Booker went to work mining salt for his stepfather. Realizing that this was not much of a life for a boy, he sought education, first trying to teach himself from a spelling book, and then walking 500 miles across Virginia to an African American school near Fort Monroe on the coast. He trained to be a teacher and eventually was asked to start what became Tuskegee Institute, where he hired another teacher born into slavery, George Washington Carver.

Booker T. became the most influential educator in America, in terms of building institutions, guiding policy, and teaching teachers of illiterate freed slaves and under-educated African Americans. WEB DuBois criticized him for being too accommodating with segregation, but Booker T. quietly supported the same anti-segregation campaigns, while working to improve the lives of as many African Americans as possible. Many celebrated his accomplishments, including Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Harvard (first African American honorary degree), and Eisenhower, who designated this monument. Others resisted, including those in Congress who refused to support or fully fund a park and those in the community who were hostile to his student building a memorial here.