[Bronze Bust] In the face of racial hatred and segregation, Booker T. Washington argued that it was unrealistic for African Americans to expect to gain immediate entry into America's white-collar professions. Washington suggested that they become a skilled and indispensable laboring class. With that accomplished, he believed, discrimination would gradually disappear.

With $2,000, Washington established the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881, where he trained African Americans for a place in the skilled labor force.

The sculptor Richmond BarthJ considered this posthumous bust of Washington one of his best likenesses. .

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Bust of Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), 1946, by Richmond BarthJ (1901-89), bronze, 1972 cast

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