Booker T. Washington’s primary goals throughout his life as an educator are to improve the standard of living for all Black Southerners and to improve relationships between Black and white people. He argues that both these goals are best pursued through industrial education, teaching people skilled trades that will allow them to find practical work in an industrializing economy. In his travels throughout the South during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era, he finds that many Black people value education primarily as a way to escape manual labor. Booker T. Washington describes this trend as dangerous, reporting that many people become teachers, ministers, or government officials with little knowledge about the world around them and no practical skills to fall back on. Part of Washington’s philosophy stems from seeing how white people lived during and shortly after slavery. After hundreds of years of enslaving other people to do all their labor for them, Washington contends that wealthy white Southerners were often left with no ability to care for themselves. Meanwhile, Black people who were able to learn useful trades while enslaved were often able to improve their condition fairly quickly.

In the Reconstruction years, Washington worries that Black people have come to view manual labor as undignified.