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Booker T. Washington Booker Taliaferro Washington was born on April 5,1856 in Franklin County, Virginia. Washington gained an early appreciation for the values of family and education. Booker had been blessed with an intact family, with one exception of having a white father who never contributed to his life and whose identity Washington never acknowledged. From the lifelong inspiration of his mother, Jane, Booker learned lasting lessons of courage, perseverance, resourcefulness, and positive concepts, which influenced many of his later philosophies and attitudes about women and family. Washington had spent nine years in slavery, with the last five years surrounded by the physical, political, economic, and moral issues of the Civil War. According to child psychologist Arnold Gesell, the nine years that Washington spent in slavery were crucial to his development and ideology. To look at Booker's life you have