The Strange Case of Booker T. Washington’s Birthday

I needed to reread Up from Slavery for the ninth-grade American history class I teach, but I got stuck on the first page. The first paragraph, actually—something I didn’t notice when I first read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography as an undergrad. I was faced with a question that took a few solid hours to answer, admittedly not a great example of time management on my part; but such excursions are the work of history.

Washington begins his memoir by admitting ignorance about what is usually a key piece of biographical information: when he was born. He writes:

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day.¹

The passage is both droll (“I must have been born somewhere and at some time”) and sobering—he does not have this information because he was born as someone else’s legal property, not as a citizen. But my attention focused on this: “the year was 1858 or 1859.” I had just made a short slideshow on Washington’s life, highlighting his leadership at the Tuskegee Institute and his fundraising prowess, how he helped erect thousands of Black schools in the rural South. My slideshow recorded his lifespan as 1856 to 1915.

I checked the Wikipedia article on Booker T. Washington. It not only provided his birth year but the specific date: April 5, 1856. This was puzzling. In 1901, when he wrote Up from Slavery, Washington knew neither his birthday nor his birth year—and he guessed he was born two or three years after 1856.

Maybe Wikipedia had it wrong. I rather doubted this, given how prominent a figure Washington is and how dedicated Wikipedia’s editors are to ensuring accuracy. Still, it was time to check the citations.

Next to Washington’s birth and death dates was a footnote linking to the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Booker T. Washington. This article, too, listed Washington’s birth date as April 5, 1856, but it provided no further citations. This was evidence, however, that April 5, 1856 was at least widely accepted to be his birth date.

I went back to the Wikipedia article and scrolled down to see if there was more information on his birth. The “Overview” section began with the sentence, “In 1856, Washington was born into slavery in Virginia as the son of Jane, an African-American slave.” This was followed by another footnote, citing Michael Rudolph West’s book The Education of Booker T. Washington, page 84. The footnote included a link to the Internet Archive, where you can borrow West’s book for an hour at a time. I looked at page 84 and found no mention of Washington’s birth, only a discussion of his mother Jane. I looked elsewhere in the book—nothing about his birth. Apparently the footnote was just meant to support the statement that Washington’s mother was named Jane.²

I scrolled further down the Wikipedia article to a section on Washington’s “Early life.” The article said that Washington “never knew the day, month, and year of his birth, but the year on his headstone reads 1856.” This sentence included two citations: to the opening paragraph of Up from Slavery, and to Washington’s page on Find a Grave. The photographs were clear. His headstone does indeed read, “BOOKER T. WASHINGTON / 1856–1915.” I didn’t know if this was the original headstone, but it was yet more evidence that 1856 is the consensus birth year.

Now my question was: when and how did this become the consensus? To find this out, I went to Google Books, where millions of books have been digitized. I entered the search terms “Booker T. Washington” and “April 5, 1856.” I sorted the results by publication date and clicked back to the earliest results (i.e., the oldest books).

The first book that mentioned April 5, 1856 in conjunction with Washington was a curriculum packet on American writers, published by the Hampton Institute (Washington’s alma mater) in 1917. The packet included a collection of writings by and about Booker T. Washington, along with a biographical sketch. On the first page, in bold letters underneath his name, were the dates “April 5, 1856–November 14, 1915.” Halfway down the page, however, the biographical sketch began, “Booker T. Washington was born a slave near Hale’s Ford in Franklin Co., Va. in 1858”!³

So here was evidence that the date of April 5, 1856 was already emerging as the consensus birth date within two years of Washington’s death—and also evidence that forging this consensus might’ve required some work, given the opening lines of Up from Slavery.

How far back could I find that date of April 5, 1856? I opened a different website, Newspapers.com, which has digitized millions of newspaper issues. (Unlike with Google Books, a paid subscription is required to access the site.) I entered the search terms “Washington” and “April 5, 1856.” I didn’t include “Booker T.” in my search terms because old newsprint isn’t always read correctly by the optical character recognition (OCR) software, and “Booker T.” seemed like something the software could easily misread.

Newspapers.com allows you to sort results from “Oldest” to “Newest,” which I did. I was surprised at what I found. The earliest result was from 1916 and was about someone named C. S. Reinhart, born on April 5, 1856. The next two results were from 1923 and 1936 and weren’t about Booker T. Washington either. Then I noticed all the results were from newspapers published in the state of Washington. I scrolled up and saw a prompt from the website:

Showing results for “april 5 1856” in Washington

Search instead for washington “april 5, 1856” as a keyword search?

In other words, the search engine assumed I had entered “Washington” as a location name, not as a search term. I clicked a button that I thought would adjust the search to what I meant, but nothing changed. So I figured, to keep things simple, I would refresh the website and use the search terms “Booker,” “Washington,” and “April 5, 1856.” I was still wary of using the middle initial T, since that could be misread by the OCR software and some articles may have used his full middle name Taliaferro (pronounced “Tolliver”).⁴

I ran into new problems. When I sorted the results by date, the oldest results were from 1856!

But after looking at the first result, I could see what was happening. The April 12, 1856 issue of the Opelousas Patriot mentioned a steamboat that departed Washington, D.C., “every Saturday at 10 o’clock A.M.”; it had a notice dated April 5, 1856, announcing that “the copartnership known by the firm BUTLER & HOLLIER no longer exists”; and it advertised the services of E. L. Nimmo, an agent for the Knickerbocker Life Insurance Company, with “bocker” separated from “Knicker-” by a hyphen and a line break, the OCR software misreading “bocker” as “booker.”

On Newspapers.com, you can filter your results by entering a specific date range. I did this next, narrowing everything down to newspaper issues published from 1913 to 1917. This was much more useful. The earliest result was from November 18, 1915, only four days after Booker T. Washington died. It was an obituary in the Tuskegee News, lauding the man who had been the school’s principal since its founding in 1881.

The obituary’s account of Washington’s birth was like many I had read already: “Booker Taliaferro Washington was born on a large plantation, April 5, 1856, near Hales Ford Post Office, Franklin County, Virginia.” But this did establish that April 5, 1856 was accepted as his birth date within a few days of his death. It was interesting that I hadn’t yet found the date published anywhere while Washington was alive; but then again, how often is someone’s birth date mentioned in print before they die?

I went back to Google Books and looked through the early results for “Booker T. Washington” and “April 5, 1856.” After the Hampton Institute curriculum packet, there were several textbooks and popular histories from the 1930s through the 1950s which included the birth date as a given fact. But one of the snippets caught my eye: some sort of Congressional document from 1956, which read in part, “According to the Burroughs family Bible, Booker T . Washington was born (presumably on the plantation) April 5, 1856.”⁵

This was the first source I had seen which acknowledged that the April 5 date required evidence to support it—and alluded to such evidence, namely the “Burroughs family Bible.” As I knew from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, Booker and his mother Jane were enslaved by a man named James Burroughs; it was on Burroughs’s plantation that Booker was born. I clicked through to read more.

The Congressional document was a House subcommittee hearing on a proposal to make Booker T. Washington’s birthplace a national monument. The snippet I saw on the Google Books search results page was from the Department of the Interior’s report on the proposal, as requested by the subcommittee. The Department actually recommended the birthplace not be made a national monument, for while Washington was “an impressive national figure, the birth site is not equally impressive, since it is largely devoid of original structures or object remains associated with him.” (The site is home to a reconstructed slave cabin and a tobacco barn built in the 1890s.)⁶ Congress made it a national monument anyway.

As for the birth date, there wasn’t any new information besides what I saw in the Google Books snippet. But that was an important snippet, because it gave me a new search term! Surely I wasn’t the first person to notice the discrepancy between Booker T. Washington’s official birth date and what he wrote in Up from Slavery. Any historian trying to answer this riddle would likely have mentioned the Burroughs family bible.

So I started a new search on Google Books, using the terms “Booker T. Washington,” “April 5, 1856,” “Burroughs,” and “Bible.” There were only a dozen or so results. Many of them were versions of the same House document from 1956 I had already seen. But there was an interesting snippet from 1972: the first volume of Louis R. Harlan’s authoritative biography of Washington.

Google Books wouldn’t allow me to look at the full page, but I was able to borrow it from the Internet Archive. The first sentence of the first chapter asserted that Booker T. Washington was born “probably in the spring of 1856.” The corresponding endnote on page 325 read, in part:

BTW [Booker T. Washington] gave his age as nineteen in September 1874, which would suggest his birth in 1855 or late 1854. (Student Accounts No. 3, Oct. 1872–June 1876, ledger in Business Office, Hampton Institute.) As an adult, however, BTW believed he was born in 1857 or 1858. He celebrated his birthday on Easter, either because he had been told he was born in the spring, or simply in order to keep holidays to a minimum. After BTW’s death, John H. Washington [Booker’s brother] reported seeing BTW’s birth date, April 5, 1856, in a Burroughs family bible. On this testimony, the Tuskegee trustees formally adopted that day as “the exact date of his birth.” The trustees were understandably anxious to establish a time for celebrating the Founder’s birthday, however, and apparently no one has seen this Bible since. Max B. Thrasher, “Some Facts in Regard to Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute,” typescript, ca. 1900 (Con. 977); minutes of Board of Trustees of Tuskegee Institute, Dec. 13, 1915 (Con. 1088).⁷

As an earlier sentence in the endnote explained, “Con. 977” and “Con. 1088” referred to individual containers in the Booker T. Washington Papers held at the Library of Congress. I looked to see if the Library of Congress had digitized the papers, so I could see the board minutes myself, but it hasn’t. Tuskegee University hasn’t digitized them either.

Anyhow, Harlan seemed a tad skeptical about the date. At least 1856 was happily in the middle of the various birth years Booker T. Washington had claimed. And though the Tuskegee trustees were surely eager to have an exact birth date (which was printed mere days later in the Tuskegee News), it wasn’t clear why Booker’s brother would have made up the story about the Bible. Still, he could have misremembered the date. Or he could have remembered the date correctly but it had been misrecorded in the Bible!

There was another Google Books result from 1972, one I initially ignored because it was a doctoral dissertation: “An Assessment of Booker Taliaferro Washington’s Educational Influence in the United States and West Africa between the Years 1880 and 1925,” by William H. Thomas. I ignored it not because dissertations are less trustworthy than books, but because they are harder to track down online.

However, I discovered that Michigan State University (where Thomas received his doctorate) has made the dissertation available as a free PDF.

The dissertation gave a similar account to Harlan’s, with John H. Washington finding the birth date in the Burroughs family bible after Booker’s death. In a footnote, Thomas cited a 1948 biography, Booker T. Washington: Educator and Interracial Interpreter by Basil Mathews.⁸

My good luck continued; this book is freely accessible via the Internet Archive. Mathews wrote (and Thomas paraphrased in his dissertation):

Immediately after [Booker’s] death, in order to set the records straight, inquiry was made of the family on whose plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, the slave boy was born. His brother, John, found in the family Bible that had belonged to James Burroughs, the owner of their slave mother, that the birth of Booker was recorded there on April 5, 1856.

Mathews mentioned in a footnote that “the Bible was carried to Tuskegee Institute and was destroyed in a fire.”⁹

Here was an account of the family bible story that predated Louis Harlan’s biography by a couple of decades, with the details practically the same. It isn’t clear why Harlan didn’t mention the Tuskegee fire; either he missed that detail in Mathews’s biography or he wasn’t sure he believed it.

William H. Thomas’s dissertation did contribute a new data point: in 1970, Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Records and Health Statistics sent him a copy of a birth certificate for an unnamed “colored male child … born on the James Burroughs’ Plantation, April 18, 1856.”¹⁰ This casts more doubt on April 5 as the exact date. However, it does strengthen the case that Booker T. Washington was born in 1856, rather than 1854, 1855, 1857, 1858, or 1859; and probably in April.

At this point, it occurred to me there was something I could do more easily than William Thomas, Basil Mathews, or for that matter John H. Washington could—I could look for Booker in the U.S. census records.

You can search through census records on Ancestry.com (which also requires a paid subscription). I wasn’t going to find Booker’s name, or the name of virtually any enslaved person, in the 1860 census. Instead, I would need to look for the name of James Burroughs—Booker’s enslaver—in the U.S. Census Bureau’s slave schedules.

I searched for the name James Burroughs, specifying that he lived in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1860. His entry in the 1860 slave schedules was among the first results.

It looked like any other slave schedule I had seen before. Beside the name “Jas Burroughs” (Jas. was a common abbreviation for James) were data on the seven people he owned—each slave’s age, sex (F or M), and color (B for black, M for mulatto, or mixed-race). And there were two mulatto boys, aged 4 and 8.¹¹

I knew from Harlan’s biography that both Booker and John had white fathers, and that John thought he “was about three and a half years older than his brother.”¹² It seemed pretty likely that these two boys were Booker and John, with Booker born around 1856 and John around 1852.

I wondered if I could find Booker in the 1870 census, too. It’s usually easier to find a child in the census by looking for the head of household first. In 1870 that was Washington Ferguson, Booker’s stepfather—from whom Booker derived his surname. Ferguson escaped to Malden, West Virginia, during the Civil War, and after the war Booker’s family moved to Malden to live with him.¹³

So I searched for the name Washington Ferguson, specifying that he lived in Malden, West Virginia, in 1870. The first and best result was for a “Watt Furgerson” in Malden, and sure enough two boys lived with him named Booker (14 years old, so born around 1856) and John (17 years old, so born around 1853). The household also included Booker’s younger sister Amanda and his adoptive brother James. Even the occupations were right; Watt/Washington was a salt-packer, while Booker was a domestic servant.¹⁴

One last thing was nagging me, though. Where was Jane? The 1870 census reported a 59-year-old Nancy in the “Furgerson” household. Was this the same person as Booker’s mother?

It hadn’t occurred to me to look for Jane in the 1860 slave schedules, so I went back to the James Burroughs entry. He reportedly owned two women, one aged 40 and the other 41. If one of these was Jane, and if she was the same person as Nancy, then obviously she had not aged 18 or 19 years in a decade; the age was incorrect in one or both of the census documents.

Curious if someone else had looked into this, I searched for “Watt Furgerson” in Google Books. It turned out Louis Harlan discussed this precise matter in his 1972 biography! I missed it when skimming the book earlier. And rather than trying to square the 1870 census’s Nancy with Jane, Harlan prudently recalled that census takers often got things wrong:

In the manuscript census of 1870, the whole family is listed as bearing the name of “Furgerson,” but there are so many other errors in the return as to cast doubt on the census taker’s accuracy. The head of the family was listed as Watt Furgerson, his wife as Nancy. John was described incorrectly as black and Amanda incorrectly as mulatto.¹⁵

What to do now? This is history for you: after hours of looking at different kinds of sources and piecing together a narrative, you usually reach a point where you have to shrug, turn around, and walk back. But where should I walk back to?

I decided to do something I hadn’t done in six years: edit a Wikipedia article. After some trial and error I was able to log back into an old, barely-used account (wrb2, in case you’re curious) and I went to work. I focused on the sentence in the “Early life” section, which had provided Washington’s gravestone as the sole evidence for his birth year. This was really not the best source for an encyclopedia, where the goal is not to present original research but rather the scholarly consensus. So I tweaked the sentence to read, “He never knew the day, month, and year of his birth (although evidence emerged after his death that he was born on April 5, 1856),” and I changed the citation from Find a Grave to Louis Harlan’s lengthy footnote on Washington’s birth date and the Burroughs family bible. I was tempted to add more to the footnote, but decided I should leave it at the Harlan biography. This edit, I hoped, would convey the scholarly consensus more clearly.

So there we have it. Maybe this edit won’t survive the scrutiny of other Wikipedians, but I’ve done my bit. Now I can go back to reading the first page of Up from Slavery.

1. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901; reprint, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1907), 1.
2. Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 84.
3. Hampton Leaflets, vol. 7, no. 12, American Authors’ Birthdays: Programs and Materials (Hampton, VA: Press of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 1917), 53.
4. On the pronunciation of Taliaferro, see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (hereinafter cited as Booker T. Washington, vol. 1; New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 36.
5. Booker T. Washington National Monument, Virginia: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Public Lands of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., serial no. 30 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 50.
6. Betsy Haynes, “National Park Getaway: Booker T. Washington National Monument,” National Park Service, updated May 10, 2018.
7. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, vol. 1, 3, 325n1.
8. William H. Thomas, “An Assessment of Booker Taliaferro Washington’s Educational Influence in the United States and West Africa between the Years 1880 and 1925” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1972), 15.
9. Basil Mathews, Booker T. Washington: Educator and Interracial Interpreter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 3.
10. Thomas, “Assessment,” 15n2.
11. 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Northeastern District, Franklin County, Virginia, p. 21.
12. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, vol. 1, 3–5, 9–10, 325n2 (quotation).
13. Ibid., 25, 29, 36.
14. 1870 U.S. Federal Census, Malden, Kanawha County, West Virginia, p. 30; Harlan, Booker T. Washington, vol. 1, 29–32, 39–40; Washington, Up from Slavery, 25–26, 43–45.
15. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, vol. 1, 36.