Booker T. Washington High School is a high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was named after the African-American education pioneer Booker T. Washington. It is one of nine high schools in the Tulsa Public Schools system.

Overview

Booker T. Washington is a public high school that accepts students based upon their academic merit, rather than their geographical location. The school uses applicants' middle school grades and attendance record, as well as their Iowa Tests of Educational Development scores, to determine admission. To ensure greater ethnic, economic, and intellectual diversity, students who live in historically minority and economically depressed neighborhoods are offered preferential consideration.

History

Oklahoma statehood brought about segregated schools for African-American children. The first such school in Tulsa was a two-room wooden building built in 1908 on Hartford Avenue, between Cameron and Easton Streets. It served grades 1 through 8 until 1913. In that year, Dunbar Grade School opened at 504 Easton Street in an 18-room brick building, with a four-room frame building that served as a high school.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community.

Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the "Atlanta compromise," which brought him national fame. He called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. Washington mobilized a nationwide coalition of middle-class blacks, church leaders, and white philanthropists and politicians, with a long-term goal of building the community's economic strength and pride by a focus on self-help and schooling. But, secretly, he also supported court challenges to segregation and passed on funds raised for this purpose. Black militants in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise but after 1909, they set up the NAACP to work for political change. They tried with limited success to challenge Washington's political machine for leadership in the black community but also built wider networks among white allies in the North. Decades after Washington's death in 1915, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s took a more active and militant approach, which was also based on new grassroots organizations based in the South, such as CORE, SNCC and SCLC.

Booker T may refer to

Booker Huffman Jr. (born March 1, 1965), better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American professional wrestler, promoter, and color commentator who is currently signed with WWE as part of the pre-show team on Raw. He is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling (ROW) in his hometown of Houston, Texas.

Booker is best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment (WWF/E), and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), holding 35 championships between those organizations. He is the most decorated wrestler in WCW history, having held 21 titles including a record six WCW World Television Championships, and a record eleven WCW World Tag Team Championships: ten as one half of Harlem Heat with his brother, Lash "Stevie Ray" Huffman in WCW, and one in the WWF with Test.

Booker is a six-time world champion, having won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship five times (four times in WCW, and once in the WWF) and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. He is the first non-mixed race African American to become a world champion in WWE, and was voted the greatest World Heavyweight Champion of all time in a 2013 WWE viewer poll. Booker has also gained notable success as a tag team wrestler, being a 15-time world tag team champion between WCW (11 times), WWF/E (three times), and TNA (once). Additionally, he was the winner of the King of the Ring tournament in 2006, the sixteenth Triple Crown Champion and the ninth Grand Slam Champion in WWE history. As the ninth (and final) Triple Crown Champion in WCW history, Booker is one of four men in history to achieve both the WWE and WCW Triple Crowns.