Booker T. intentionally sought only the best for his new project. He hired Robert Taylor, the first black architect to graduate from MIT (who was also near the top of his class).

Next, Booker T. enticed Iowa botanist George Washington Carver to lead the Agriculture Department. He gave Carver free rein to conduct peanut and soybean experiments. These eventually made Carver famous and saved the economy of the South.

Booker T. improvised, innovated and risked everything to work through seemingly impossible problems. Needing buildings for students and faculty, he discovered how to make bricks by mixing straw and water with the red Alabama clay soil found on site. Though he failed several times (and nearly went bank­rupt), he persevered until he succeeded. The brickyard even sold excess bricks and made a profit. He reminded his co-laborers, “No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.”

Because it was hard, dusty work, Booker T. Washington had to overcome the “slavery mentality”—the mindset that only slaves are fit for hard work. He had to “un-teach” the false belief held by former slaves that freedom meant being free from hard work. “No race can prosper,” he wrote, “until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”