Booker Taliaferro Washington, believed to have been born in 1856 on Burroughs' farm in Franklin County, Virginia, rose from slavery and poverty to become the nation's foremost black educator and a leading force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His mother was a plantation cook, his father was believed to be a white man from a nearby farm, and his first contact with schooling came when he carried books for one of Master James Burroughs' daughters rather than attending as a student. After a United States officer read the Emancipation Proclamation to the enslaved people on the plantation in April 1865, his family left to join his stepfather, Washington Ferguson, in Malden, West Virginia, where he worked in a salt mine and attended school at night. At age 16, he walked most of the 500 miles back to Virginia to enroll in a new school for black students, gained admission to Hampton Institute by proving himself through work, later became an instructor, and in 1881 became a principal and guiding force in the establishment of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Washington built his social philosophy around self-reliance, the dignity of labor, and success measured by obstacles overcome, though critics argued that his conservative approach weakened the struggle for racial equality. In his 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition address, he said that people could be separate in purely social matters yet united in essential mutual progress, but by the last years of his life he had moved away from many accommodationist policies and spoke out more frankly against racism. He died at age 59 and is remembered for helping empower Black Americans to rise above the economic slavery that persisted long after legal freedom.