Bocker T Washington

During my walk around the city I came across a brass engravings placed within the pavement. One of them was about this man. I thought I'd find out more. It may not interest you as much as it did me.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an African-American of mixed race. He became an educator, author, orator, adviser to Republican presidents, and black political leader. One of the last generation of black American leaders born in slavery, he spoke on behalf of a constituency of Black Americans who lived in the South, but had lost their ability to vote through disfranchisement by the southern States. 
Washington was born into slavery to Jane, an enslaved African-American woman on the Burroughs Plantation in southwest Virginia. She never identified his white father, said to be a nearby planter. His birth father played no role in Washington's life. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, when his family gained freedom, his mother took them to West Virginia. Here she formally married the now freedman Washington Ferguson. Booker T took the surname Washington at school after his stepfather.
From 1890 to 1915 Booker T Washington became a dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States, but was not uncontroversial. His opponents disparagingly called his powerful network of white politicians, businessmen and philanthropist supporters the "Tuskegee Machine." Washington maintained influence through his ability to gain support from a wide diversity of groups. As well as influential whites, he recruited educational and religious communities nationwide. However, his accommodation to the 'political realities' in the age of the racist 'Jim Crow segregation' brought disapproval from other Human Rights activists.
Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exhibition address was viewed as a "revolutionary moment" by both African-Americans and whites across the country. Then fellow activist, W. E. B. Du Bois supported him, but they grew apart as Du Bois sought more direct action to remedy disenfranchisement and lower education. After their falling out, Du Bois and his supporters referred to Washington's speech as the "Atlanta Compromise".
Washington advocated a "go slow" approach.The effect was that many Southern Blacks had to accept sacrifices of the potential political power, civil rights and higher education they sought. His belief was that African-Americans should "concentrate all their energies on industrial education, accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South."

Washington was on close terms with national Republican leaders, and was often asked for political advice by presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Washington argued that the surest way for blacks to gain equal social rights was to demonstrate "industry, thrift, intelligence and property." He also said, "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed".

Booker T Jones, and the MGs, was someone entirely different. Their tune 'Green Onions' remains a classic instrumental.