Booker T. Washington: “I was determined from the first to make my work as janitor so valuable that my services would be indispensable.”

In this connection I have never been able to understand how the slaves throughout the South, completely ignorant as were the masses so far as books or newspapers were concerned, were able to keep themselves so accurately and completely…

In order to defend and protect the women and children who were left on the plantations when the white males went to war, the slaves would have laid down their lives.

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

I think I never saw a community of people so happy over anything as were the coloured people over the prospect of this new building.