Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 3
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AUTHORS' PREFACE
THIS is not a biography in the ordinary sense. The exhaustive "Life and Letters
of Booker T. Washington" remains still to be compiled. In this more modest
work we have simply sought to present and interpret the chief phases of the life
of this man who rose from a slave boy to be the leader of ten millions of people
and to take his place for all time among America's great men. In fact, we have
not even touched upon his childhood, early training, and education, because we
felt the story of those early struggles and privations had been ultimately well
told in his own words in "Up from Slavery." This autobiography, however,
published as it was fifteen years before his death, brings the story of his life only
to the threshold of his greatest achievements. In this book we seek to give the
full fruition of his life's work. Each chapter is complete in itself. Each presents a
complete, although by no means exhaustive, picture of some phase of his life.
We take no small satisfaction in the fact that we were personally selected by
Booker Washington himself for this task. He considered us qualified to produce
what he wanted: namely, a record of his struggles and achievements at once
accurate and readable, put in permanent form for the information of the public.
He believed that
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such a record could best be furnished by his confidential associate, working in
collaboration with a trained and experienced writer, sympathetically interested
in the welfare of the Negro race. This, then, is what we have tried to do and the
way we have tried to do it.
We completed the first four chapters before Mr. Washington's death, but he
never read them. In fact, it was our wish, to which he agreed, that he should not
read what we had written until its publication in book form.
EMMETT J. SCOTT,
LYMAN BEECHER STOWE.
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24.03.2006