is the grandson of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" had a very direct influence on the abolition of slavery,
and Mr. Emmett J. Scott was Dr. Washington's loyal and trusted
secretary for eighteen years.

ROBERT R. MOTON.
Principal Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.

_Tuskegee Institute, Alabama,_
_August 1, 1916._

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 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.

PREFACE

It is not hyperbole to say that Booker T. Washington was a great
American. For twenty years before his death he had been the most
useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the
world, and one of the most useful, as well as o