Booker T. Washington (c.1856 -1915) saw that the solution of American race relations in the late nineteenth century lay in education and work. Through his role as principal of a new training school for blacks in Tuskegee Alabama he built a foundation for education and training of blacks in the south. The Tuskegee Institute curriculum focused on technical and practical skills that would provide its students with job skills and a means to make a living. Only through hard work and economic success, Washington believed, could blacks and whites come to find mutual respect for each other. He founded the National Negro Business League in 1900 to shepherd these goals. His first autobiography "Up from Slavery," (1901) offered his life as an example of success and he constantly relayed an optimistic view of the future for all Americans to his students and the national community.