Fannie (Fanny) Smith Washington

Fannie (Fanny) Smith Washington was a nineteenth-century educator, and the first wife of Booker T. Washington. Before her premature death in 1884, Fannie Washington aided her husband in the early development of the Tuskegee Institute.

Born sometime in the year of 1858, Fannie Virginia Norton Smith (sometimes spelled "Fanny") grew up in what is now Malden, Kanawha County, West Virginia. Her father was Samuel Smith, said to be part Shawnee, and her mother was Celia (or Cecelia) Smith. Malden being the same town where Booker T. Washington lived from the age of nine to sixteen, the pair were likely acquainted from an early age.

Smith grew up in a rural area without a lot of opportunity for education, especially for an African American woman. However, she was able to pursue advanced studies through hard work and determination.

As a young woman, Fannie Smith attended the day program at a local school in Marden, with around eighty or ninety fellow pupils. Her intellect and determination attracted the attention of her teacher at the time, Booker T. Washington. Washington, only two years Fannie’s senior, paid special attention to those students he considered to have promise, and often prepared them to enter and attend the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Known colloquially as “Booker Washington’s boys,” Fannie was the only woman in the group at the time.

Soon after gaining admission to the Hampton Institute, Fannie Smith fell behind in payments, and temporarily left Hampton in 1878. For the next two years, Fannie taught at a school near Marden in order to save money for her own education. In addition to a daily three-mile walk to and from the school, Smith was also acting as a primary caregiver for her mother. In January 1880, she sent her final payment of $48 to J.F.B. Marshall. At that point, she was earning $32.50 a month through her teacher’s salary, but most of it was being used to meet household expenses. She was placed on the roll of honor, as a student “who, leaving the school in debt to it, have paid their debts in full from their earnings as teachers or otherwise.” Smith returned to the Hampton Institute, graduating in June 1882.

After Fannie’s graduation from the Hampton Institute in 1882, she and Booker T. Washington were married in Rice’s Zion Baptist Church in the Tinkersville section of Malden on August 2 of that year. She was twenty-four years old. Fannie’s mother, Celia, was “unenthusiastic” about the marriage due to Booker T. Washington’s less than impressive financial situation and the fact that the marriage would take her daughter so far from home in Marden.

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