Black History is Oklahoma History

Booker T. Washington’s arrival in Muskogee caused a commotion. His arrival attracted a crowd estimated to number between five and six thousand when he arrived on November 20th, 1905. Naturally, most in the crowd were African Americans. The heavy foot of Jim Crow still separated the Black race from everyone else. Consequently, many in Indian Territory wanted to hear how they could finally, fully be free. The Civil War ended forty years earlier in Virginia. It was not lost on the crowd that Dr. Washington was born a slave in Virginia. It was also common knowledge that he had dined with the President of the United States. Everyone who came to Muskogee, it seems, wanted to learn how he overcame his humble beginnings. Booker Taliaferro Washington lived under slavery for nine years. After the war ended, his mother moved the family to the new state of West Virginia. There he began studying in school for the first time. It was under these circumstances that he learned to read and write at a later age than students do today. At age sixteen, Booker left home to enter the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute back in Virginia. A couple of years later, he attended a seminary in Washington, D. C. In 1881, he became the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama.