Booker T. Washington got into the Hampton Institute by sweeping a room three times and dusting it four, and he went on to become the first African American invited to dine at the White House as a social equal. This episode follows him from his birth into slavery on a Virginia tobacco plantation, through emancipation, child labor in salt furnaces and coal mines, and the moment he chose his own surname.

We look at how he built the Tuskegee Institute from a leaky church room, with students who made their own bricks, how he recruited George Washington Carver, and the major roles his three wives played. We then examine the Atlanta Address, W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticism of the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington’s secret funding of lawsuits against grandfather clauses, the Rosenwald schools, the backlash over his dinner with Theodore Roosevelt, and his death from stress-driven hypertension.

• How the deprivations of slavery and a hunger for literacy shaped Washington’s drive
• The broom test at Hampton and the brick-by-brick building of Tuskegee
• “Cast down your bucket where you are” and the debate with Du Bois over accommodation and civil rights
• The Tuskegee Machine, covert legal challenges, and the matching-funds model behind nearly 5,000 Rosenwald schools
• The 1901 White House dinner backlash, his 2006 medical reassessment, and how historians view his pragmatism today