In this chapter I wish to show how, at Tuskegee, we are trying to work
out the plan of industrial training, and trust I shall be pardoned the
seeming egotism if I preface the sketch with a few words, by way of
example, as to the expansion of my own life and how I came to
undertake the work at Tuskegee.
My earliest recollection is of a small one-room log hut on a slave
plantation in Virginia. After the close of the war, while working in
the coal mines of West Virginia for the support of my mother, I heard,
in some accidental way, of the Hampton Institute. When I learned that
it was an institution where a black boy could study, could have a
chance to work for his board, and at the same time be taught how to
work and to realise the dignity of labor, I resolved to go there.
Bidding my mother good-by, I started out one morning to find my way
to Hampton, although I was almost penniless and had no definite idea
as to where Hampton was. By walking, begging rides, and paying for a
portion of the journey on the steam-cars, I finally succeeded in
reaching the city of Richmond; Virginia. I was without money or
friends. I slept on a sidewalk; and by working on a vessel the next
day I earned money enough to continue my way to the institute, where I
arrived with a capital of fifty cents. At Hampton I found the
opportunity--in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries
provided by the generous--to get training in the classroom and by
practical touch with industrial life,--to learn thrift, economy, and
push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian
influence, and spirit of self-help, that seemed to have awakened every
faculty in me, and caused me for the first time to realise what it
meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.
While there, I resolved, when I had finished the course of training, I
would go into the Far South, into the Black Belt of the South, and
give my life to providing the same kind of opportunity for
self-reliance, self-awakening, that I had found provided for me at
Hampton.
My work began at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, in a small shanty church,
with one teacher and thirty students, without a dollar's worth of
property. The spirit of work and of industrial thrift, with aid from
the State and generosity from the North, have enabled us to develop an
institution which now has about one thousand students, gathered from
twenty-three States, and eighty-eight instructors. Counting students,
instructors, and their families, we have a resident population upon
the school grounds of about twelve hundred persons.
The institution owns two thousand three hundred acres of land, seven
hundred of which are cultivated by student labor. There are six
hundred head of live-stock, including horses, mules, cows, hogs, and
sheep. There are over forty vehicles that have been made, and are now
used, by the school. Training is given in twenty-six industries. There
is work in wood, in iron, in leather, in tin; and all forms of
domestic economy are engaged in. Students are taught mechanical and
architectural drawing, receive training as agriculturists, dairymen,
masons, carpenters, contractors, builders, as machinists,
electricians, printers, dressmakers, and milliners, and in other
directions.
The value of the property is $300,000. There are forty-two buildings,
counting large and small, all of which, with the exception of four,
have been erected by the labour of the students.
Since this work started, there has been collected and spent for its
founding and support $800,000. The annual expense is now not far from
$75,000. In a humble, simple manner the effort has been to place a
great object-lesson in the heart of the South for the elevation of the
coloured people, where there should be, in a high sense, that union of
head, heart, and hand which has been the foundation of the greatness
of all races since the world began.
What is the object of all this outlay? It must be first borne in mind
that we have in the South a peculiar and unprecedented state of
things. The cardinal needs among the eight million coloured people in
the South, most of whom are to be found on the plantations, may be
stated as food, clothing, shelter, education, proper habits, and a
settlement of race relations. These millions of coloured people of the
South cannot be reached directly by any missionary agent; but they can
be reached by sending out among them strong, selected young men and
women, with the proper training of head, hand, and heart, who will
live among them and show them how to lift themselves up.
The problem that the Tuskegee Institute keeps before itself constantly
is how to prepare these leaders. From the outset, in connection with
religious and academic training, it has emphasised industrial, or
hand, training as a means of finding the way out of present
conditions. First, we have found the industrial teaching useful in
giving the student a chance to work out a portion of his expenses
while in school. Second, the school furnishes labour that has an
economic value and at the same time gives the student a chance to
acquire knowledge and skill while performing the labour. Most of all,
we find the industrial system valuable in teaching economy, thrift,
and the dignity of labour and in giving moral backbone to students.
The fact that a student goes into the world conscious of his power to
build a house or a wagon or to make a set of harness gives him a
certain confidence and moral independence that he would not possess
without such training.
A more detailed example of our methods at Tuskegee may be of interest.
For example, we cultivate by student labour seven hundred acres of
land. The object is not only to cultivate the land in a way to make it
pay our boarding department, but at the same time to teach the
students, in addition to the practical work, something of the
chemistry of the soil, the best methods of drainage, dairying,
cultivation of fruit, the care of live-stock and tools, and scores of
other lessons needed by people whose main dependence is on
agriculture.
Friends some time ago provided means for the erection of a large new
chapel at Tuskegee. Our students made the bricks for this chapel. A
large part of the timber was sawed by the students at our saw-mill,
the plans were drawn by our teacher of architectural and mechanical
drawing, and students did the brick-masonry, the plastering, the
painting, the carpentry work, the tinning, the slating, and made most
of the furniture. Practically, the whole chapel was built and
furnished by student labour. Now the school has this building for
permanent use, and the students have a knowledge of the trades
employed in its construction.
While the young men do the kinds of work I have mentioned, young women
to a large extent make, mend, and laundry the clothing of the young
men. They also receive instruction in dairying, horticulture, and
other valuable industries.
One of the objections sometimes urged against industrial education for
the Negro is that it aims merely to teach him to work on the same
plan that he worked on when in slavery. This is far from being the
object at Tuskegee. At the head of each of the twenty-six industrial
divisions we have an intelligent and competent instructor, just as we
have in our history classes, so that the student is taught not only
practical brick-masonry, for example, but also the underlying
principles of that industry, the mathematics and the mechanical and
architectural drawing. Or he is taught how to become master of the
forces of nature, so that, instead of cultivating corn in the old way,
he can use a corn cultivator that lays off the furrows, drops the corn
into them, and covers it; and in this way he can do more work than
three men by the old process of corn planting, while at the same time
much of the toil is eliminated and labour is dignified. In a word, the
constant aim is to show the student how to put brains into every
process of labour, how to bring his knowledge of mathematics and the
sciences in farming, carpentry, forging, foundry work, how to dispense
as soon as possible with the old form of _ante-bellum_ labour. In the
erection of the chapel referred to, instead of letting the money which
was given to us go into outside hands, we made it accomplish three
objects: first, it provided the chapel; second, it gave the students a
chance to get a practical knowledge of the trades connected with the
building; and, third, it enabled them to earn something toward the
payment of their board while receiving academic and industrial
training.
Having been fortified at Tuskegee by education of mind, skill of hand,
Christian character, ideas of thrift, economy, and push, and a spirit
of independence, the student is sent out to become a centre of
influence and light in showing the masses of our people in the Black
Belt of the South how to lift themselves up. Can this be done? I give
but one or two examples. Ten years ago a young coloured man came to
the institute from one of the large plantation districts. He studied
in the class-room a portion of the time, and received practical and
theoretical training on the farm the remainder of the time. Having
finished his course at Tuskegee, he returned to his plantation home,
which was in a county where the coloured people outnumbered the whites
six to one, as is true of many of the counties in the Black Belt of
the South. He found the Negroes in debt. Ever since the war they had
been mortgaging their crops for the food on which to live while the
crops were growing. The majority of them were living from
hand-to-mouth on rented land, in small one-room log cabins, and
attempting to pay a rate of interest on their advances that ranged
from fifteen to forty per cent. per annum. The school had been taught
in a wreck of a log cabin, with no apparatus, and had never been in
session longer than three months out of twelve. He found the people,
as many as eight or ten persons, of all ages and conditions and of
both sexes, huddled together and living in one-room cabins year after
year, and with a minister whose only aim was to work upon the
emotions. One can imagine something of the moral and religious state
of the community.
But the remedy! In spite of the evil the Negro got the habit of work
from slavery. The rank and file of the race, especially those on the
Southern plantations, work hard; but the trouble is that what they
earn gets away from them in high rents, crop mortgages, whiskey,
snuff, cheap jewelry, and the like. The young man just referred to had
been trained at Tuskegee, as most of our graduates are, to meet just
this condition of things. He took the three months' public school as
a nucleus for his work. Then he organized the older people into a
club, or conference, that held meetings every week. In these meetings
he taught the people, in a plain, simple manner, how to save their
money, how to farm in a better way, how to sacrifice,--to live on
bread and potatoes, if necessary, till they could get out of debt, and
begin the buying of lands.
Soon a large proportion of the people were in a condition to make
contracts for the buying of homes (land is very cheap in the South)
and to live without mortgaging their crops. Not only this; under the
guidance and leadership of this teacher, the first year that he was
among them they learned how and built, by contributions in money and
labour, a neat, comfortable school-house that replaced the wreck of a
log cabin formerly used. The following year the weekly meetings were
continued, and two months were added to the original three months of
school. The next year two more months were added. The improvement has
gone on until these people have every year an eight months' school.
I wish my readers could have the chance that I have had of going into
this community. I wish they could look into the faces of the people,
and see them beaming with hope and delight. I wish they could see the
two or three room cottages that have taken the place of the usual
one-room cabin, see the well-cultivated farms and the religious life
of the people that now means something more than the name. The teacher
has a good cottage and well-kept farm that serve as models. In a word,
a complete revolution has been wrought in the industrial, educational,
and religious life of this whole community by reason of the fact that
they have had this leader, this guide and object-lesson, to show them
how to take the money and effort that had hitherto been scattered to
the wind in mortgages and high rents, in whiskey and gewgaws, and how
to concentrate it in the direction of their own uplifting. One
community on its feet presents an object-lesson for the adjoining
communities, and soon improvements show themselves in other places.
Another student, who received academic and industrial training at
Tuskegee, established himself, three years ago, as a blacksmith and
wheelwright in a community; and, in addition to the influence of his
successful business enterprise, he is fast making the same kind of
changes in the life of the people about him that I have just
recounted. It would be easy for me to fill many pages describing the
influence of the Tuskegee graduates in every part of the South. We
keep it constantly in the minds of our students and graduates that
the industrial or material condition of the masses of our people must
be improved, as well as the intellectual, before there can be any
permanent change in their moral and religious life. We find it a
pretty hard thing to make a good Christian of a hungry man. No matter
how much our people "get happy" and "shout" in church, if they go home
at night from church hungry, they are tempted to find something to eat
before morning. This is a principle of human nature, and is not
confined alone to the Negro. The Negro has within him immense power
for self-uplifting, but for years it will be necessary to guide him
and stimulate his energies.
The recognition of this power led us to organise, five years ago, what
is known as the Tuskegee Negro Conference,--a gathering that
meets every February, and is composed of about eight hundred
representatives, coloured men and women, from all sections of the
Black Belt. They come in ox-carts, mule-carts, buggies, on muleback
and horseback, on foot, by railroad. Some travel all night in order to
be present. The matters considered at the conference are those that
the coloured people have it in their own power to control,--such as
the evils of the mortgage system, the one-room cabin, buying on
credit, the importance of owning a home and of putting money in the
bank, how to build school-houses and prolong the school term, and to
improve their moral and religious condition. As a single example of
the results, one delegate reported that since the conference was
started, seven years ago, eleven people in his neighbourhood had
bought homes, fourteen had gotten out of debt, and a number had
stopped mortgaging their crops. Moreover, a school-house had been
built by the people themselves, and the school term had been extended
from three to six months; and, with a look of triumph, he exclaimed,
"We's done libin' in de ashes."
Besides this Negro Conference for the masses of the people, we now
have a gathering at the same time known as the Tuskegee Workers'
Conference, composed of the officers and instructors of the leading
coloured schools in the South. After listening to the story of the
conditions and needs from the people themselves, the Workers'
Conference finds much food for thought and discussion. Let me repeat,
from its beginning, this institution has kept in mind the giving of
thorough mental and religious training, along with such industrial
training as would enable the student to appreciate the dignity of
labour and become self-supporting and valuable as a producing factor,
keeping in mind the occupations open in the South to the average man
of the race.
This institution has now reached the point where it can begin to judge
of the value of its work as seen in its graduates. Some years ago we
noted the fact, for example, that there was quite a movement in many
parts of the South to organise and start dairies. Soon after this, we
opened a dairy school where a number of young men could receive
training in the best and most scientific methods of dairying. At
present we have calls, mainly from Southern white men, for twice as
many dairymen as we are able to supply. The reports indicate that our
young men are giving the highest satisfaction, and are fast changing
and improving the dairy product in the communities where they labour.
I have used the dairy industry simply as an example. What I have said
of this industry is true in a larger or less degree of the others.
I cannot but believe, and my daily observation and experience confirm
me in it, that, as we continue placing men and women of intelligence,
religion, modesty, conscience, and skill in every community in the
South, who will prove by actual results their value to the community,
this will constitute the solution for many of the present political
and sociological difficulties. It is with this larger and more
comprehensive view of improving present conditions and laying the
foundation wisely that the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute is
training men and women as teachers and industrial leaders.
Over four hundred students have finished the course of training at
this institution, and are now scattered throughout the South, doing
good work. A recent investigation shows that about 3,000 students who
have taken only a partial course are doing commendable work. One young
man, who was able to remain in school but two years, has been teaching
in one community for ten years. During this time he has built a new
school-house, extended the school term from three to seven months,
and has bought a nice farm upon which he has erected a neat cottage.
The example of this young man has inspired many of the coloured people
in this community to follow his example in some degree; and this is
one of many such examples.
Wherever our graduates and ex-students go, they teach by precept and
example the necessary lesson of thrift, economy, and property-getting,
and friendship between the races.