Booker T. Washington

These night lessons were so welcome that I think I learned more at night than the other children did during the day.

Despite this disappointment, however, I determined that I would learn something, anyway.

Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education.

This experience of a whole race beginning to go to school for the first time, presents one of the most interesting studies that has ever occurred in connection with the development of any race.

If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.

Though she was totally ignorant, she had high ambitions for her children, and a large fund of good, hard, common sense, which seemed to enable her to meet and master every situation.

I determined, when quite a small child, that, if I accomplished nothing else in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read common books and newspapers.

Besides, deep down in their hearts there was a strange and peculiar attachment to “old Marster” and “old Missus,” and to their children, which they found it hard to think of breaking off.

To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.

In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved.

It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself.

The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them.