The story of Booker Taliaferro Washington who rose from a slave cabin, to be an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. The drama today is adapted from his autobiography, Up From Slavery, which describes his personal experience of having to work, to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, to his work establishing vocational schools - most notably, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.