Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, was the first African American to be featured on a coin. The profits from the sale of his commemorative coin were used to pay for a memorial to him.

Full Name: Booker Taliaferro Washington

Birth Date & Place: Born a slave
Exact date uncertain — Circa 1856-1859*
Hale's Ford, Virginia

Schooling: Hampton Institute in Virginia

Lived: Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama

Death: November 14, 1915

1881: He founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama.

1900: He established National Negro Business League.

1901-1913: He was an advisor to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

He believed the way to equality was through vocational education. He accepted social separation.

He was the first African American featured on a coin, the Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar (1946-1951).

"I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."

"Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way."

"A race, like an individual, lifts itself up by lifting others up."

"I had the feeling that to get into schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise."

Front: Booker T. Washington's face and name

Back: A picture of the cabin where Washington was born and the inscription "From Slave Cabin to Hall of Fame"

Money raised from the sale of this coin paid for a memorial to Booker T. Washington.

www.usmint.gov 

http://www.nps.gov/bowa 

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAbooker.htm 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/WASHINGTON/ch01.html