Booker T. Washington was born into slavery and yet was able to get a comprehensive formal education after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Period. He understood the primordial importance of a formal education of any type for the betterment of the condition of African Americans. His context was very difficult, in the South, segregation, discrimination and lynching were rampant and a large number of African Americans were illiterate which helped perpetuate Southern white supremacy. Booker T. Washington had founded the Tuskegee Institute to provide vocational education (education that prepares people to work on specific fields of work that require industrial or agricultural specialization but provides no education in the classic liberal arts of science, art, philosophy, social sciences, mathematics or religious studies) to Southern African Americans.
The reason he did not provide such education was that Southern laws prevented him from doing it. Washington understood that he needed to play his cards carefully as African Americans were a minority with little political power in the South and he very cleverly adopted a two-fold strategy: publicly he would accommodate Southern segregationist policies in exchange for the funds and permits to provide vocational education to a largely uncultured, illiterate and untrained African American minority. Privately and secretly, he funded every legal challenge he could to segregationist laws and policies. The accomodationist views he expressed in his Atlanta Compromise speech made Southern white supremacists feel he was not a threat to their social order and this allowed him to slowly educate and train more and more African Americans and secretly undermine segregation.
