Tuskegee is a county town in the State of Alabama, not far from
Montgomery. It is near the center of that part of the South commonly
spoken of as the "black belt," because the negro inhabitants there
greatly outnumber the whites. The town is one of the oldest in the
South. It is said, in fact, that when De Soto made his famous journey
across that part of the newly discovered continent he found an Indian
village of the same name on the site of the present town. Tuskegee is
five miles from the main line of the Southern Railroad, with which it
is connected at Chehaw by means of a narrow-gauge road.
[Illustration: THE FACULTY OF THE TUSKEGEE NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL
INSTITUTE.]
Tuskegee, as the word is oftenest used now, means the Normal and
Industrial Institute, situated a mile out from the town and forming a
little settlement in itself. This is the great school for young negro
men and women which Booker T. Washington has built up, and of which he
is the principal. The pupils who attend number a thousand each year.
It is the largest school for colored people, managed by colored
people, in the United States. There is no one connected with the
school, except some of the members of the board of trustees, who is
not of the race which the institute is designed to help.
Tuskegee Institute is so entirely the result of Booker T. Washington's
labors, and his life has been so interwoven with the development of
the school, that a brief account of his boyhood and youth is almost
indispensable to a complete description of the institute, particularly
as the conditions with which he struggled were so generally those
which confronted all of the negroes at that time.
[Illustration: PRESIDENT BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.]
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia, not long before the
breaking out of the war. It seems strange that a man who is so widely
known to-day and is so universally respected as Mr. Washington, when
asked how old he is should be obliged to reply that he does not know,
yet such is the case. The birth of one more black babies on a large
plantation at that time was a matter of too little moment to have
sufficient notice taken of it to accurately fix the date. He was a boy
old enough during the war, though, to know something of the struggle
going on around him, for, speaking in public of Lincoln once, I heard
him say: "My first acquaintance with our hero was this: Night after
night, before the dawn of day, on an old slave plantation in Virginia,
I recall the form of my sainted mother bending over the bundle of rags
that enveloped my body, on a dirt floor, breathing a fervent prayer to
Heaven that 'Massa Lincoln' might succeed, and that some day she and I
might be free."
[Illustration: MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.]
Another incident of those days I have heard him tell of in these
words: "Word was sent over the plantation for all 'the hands' to come
up to the 'big house.' We went, and to us men, women, and children
gathered in the yard some one standing on the veranda read a paper. I
was too young to understand why the men and women around me should
have begun to shout, 'Hallelujah! Praise de Lawd!' when the reading
was finished, but my mother, bending down to where I was clinging to
her dress, whispered to me that we were free."
Not long after the close of the war the Washingtons left the
plantation and went to West Virginia, where, in the coal mines, work
could be had which would pay money wages. At first Booker worked in
the mines with his brothers, but he soon became dissatisfied with the
chance for improvement which that work afforded. "The first thing that
led me to study," he has said, "was seeing a young colored man slowly
reading a newspaper to a group of colored people who surrounded him
with open mouths and gaping eyes. He was almost a god to them." The
chance to study was soon found. An energetic woman of kindly nature
hired the young colored boy to work about her house as a general
chore-boy. Finding that he was anxious to learn, she offered to teach
him to read in the spare minutes of his work, and did so. One day he
overheard a man talking about Hampton, where General Armstrong had
already begun his noble work. This, the man said, was a place where
black boys could go to school, and at the same time work to pay their
way. "As soon as I heard that," Mr. Washington has said, "I made up my
mind that Hampton was just the place for me, and that I would go
there. I started, although I had no money and did not even know where
Hampton was. I felt sure I could inquire the way as I went, and work
my passage. I walked a good share of the way, begged some rides, and
when I had earned any money which I could spare, paid my fare to ride
on the trains. I reached Richmond, Virginia, one night too late to get
any work, and I was entirely out of money. While I was walking about
wondering where I would get a lodging, I happened to see a nice dry
place under a stretch of plank sidewalk. Watching my chance when no
one was looking, I crawled in and curled up to sleep. The next day I
was so fortunate as to get work helping to unload a vessel, and, as
the job lasted several days, I came back each night to my lodging
under the sidewalk, thus saving all my wages except the little
required for food. In this way I was able to get money enough to carry
me the rest of the way to Hampton, and leave me fifty cents when I got
there."
In these days of entrance examinations to various institutions of
learning, it is interesting to read of the examination which young
Washington was required to pass before he could enter Hampton. He
tells us of it thus: "Of course," says he, "they knew nothing of me,
and, after my long tramp, days of hard labor and nights of sleeping in
barns and under sidewalks, I suppose I could not have presented a very
prepossessing appearance. After looking me over in a not very
encouraging manner, they gave me a broom and took me into a room,
which they told me to sweep. I suppose I swept that room over three or
four times before I was satisfied to call it done, when a teacher came
in and took her handkerchief and wiped the walls to see if she could
find any dust on them. After that they said I could come to the
school. So you see I passed my examination.
"At Hampton I found the opportunity, in the way of buildings,
teachers, and industries provided by the generous, to get training in
the class room, and by practical touch with industrial life to learn
thrift, economy, and push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of
business, Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed
to have awakened every faculty within me, and caused me for the first
time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of
property.
"While there I resolved that, when I had finished my 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 and self-awakening that I had found provided for me at
Hampton. My work began at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, in a small
shanty and 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, has
enabled us to develop an institution of a thousand students, gathered
from twenty-six States, with eighty-one instructors and thirty-eight
buildings.
"I am sometimes asked what is the object of all this outlay of energy
and money. To that I would answer that the needs of the ten million
colored people in the South may be roughly said to be food, clothing,
shelter, education, proper habits, and a settlement of race relations.
These ten million people can not be reached by any direct agency, but
they can be reached by sending out among them strong selected young
men and women, with the proper training of the head and hand and
heart, who will live among these masses and show them how to lift
themselves up. The problem that Tuskegee Institute keeps before itself
is how to prepare these leaders."
The first time I went to Tuskegee I happened to ride for half a day
through the State of Georgia in the same seat in the car with a man
whose conversation showed him to be one of the class to whom the
designation "unreconstructed" has sometimes been applied. An officer
in the Confederate army, he had accepted the situation at the close of
the war, but now, after thirty years, although he spoke of existing
conditions without bitterness, he spoke of them with little or no
sympathy. I had some doubt how he would comment on my errand, when I
told him that I was on my way to attend the Negro Conference at
Tuskegee. Imagine my surprise when he exclaimed: "Going to Tuskegee,
are you, to see Booker Washington? Just let me tell you there's a man
that's got the right idea of things. He's teaching the negroes to
work. I wish the South had a thousand Booker Washingtons." This man, I
learned afterward, when I was in Atlanta, was one of the most
prominent and successful business men of that city.
The second day of my stay at Tuskegee, as I came out of the rude
buildings where the conference had been held, a young colored man
waiting at the door accosted me. "Is not this Mr. ----," he said, "and
at the World's Fair were you not in charge of such an exhibit?" naming
one of the educational exhibits. I said I was the man. "Don't you
remember me?" he added, telling me where he had been working at the
time. I did remember him perfectly, and asked how he happened to be so
far removed from Chicago.
"It was like this," he said. "Next year I went to the Atlanta
Exposition. While there I heard Mr. Washington speak, and learned
about his school where negro boys could learn a trade. I had always
been at a disadvantage because I did not know how to do any kind of
work really well. So I came here and began to learn carpentering. I
have the trade nearly learned now, and when I graduate from here I
shall know how to really work."
Soon after beginning my long car ride from Tuskegee back to the North
I stepped into the mail car on the train to post some letters. The
envelopes I had used bore the imprint of Tuskegee Institute in the
corner. As I handed them to the postal clerk, he glanced at the
printing in the corner and exclaimed: "I say, that Booker Washington
is a wonderful man, isn't he? I never saw him, but he's teaching those
people there to work." Then he went on to tell me about a young
colored man whom he had known who had gone to Tuskegee and learned
harness-making, and then come home to set up business for himself.
This man told me later that he had never been farther north than
Louisville.
It seemed to me as if here was an interesting coincidence of unsought
testimony, and all tending to show how consistently Tuskegee teaches a
gospel of work. Industrial training goes hand in hand there, with
mental and moral teaching, in earnest effort to help the thousand
young negro men and women there and make their lives count for the
most possible for themselves and their race.
[Illustration: A CLASS IN MENTAL PHILOSOPHY.]
Any one who has heard Mr. Washington speak at any length to audiences
of his own race knows how earnestly he advocates industrial education
for the negro. As might be expected, then, we find at Tuskegee
practical hand training. The advantage is twofold. The students not
only learn to work, but in doing so many are enabled to work out all
or a part of the expenses which otherwise in many cases would have
prevented them from remaining at the school.
[Illustration: ARMSTRONG HALL. One of the oldest buildings at
Tuskegee.]
Of the thirty-eight buildings at Tuskegee, all but the first three,
and these are among the smallest ones, have been built by the
students. Several of the largest of these buildings are of brick, and
the educational process begins in the institute's own brickyard, where
a class of muscular young men are making bricks under the direction of
a capable instructor, and in making them learn the trade which they
expect to follow in after life. This yard not only makes all the
bricks the institute uses, but many thousand more to be sold each year
for use in the surrounding country.
[Illustration: ALABAMA HALL. One of the first buildings erected by the
students.]
I heard Mr. Washington tell to an audience of fifteen hundred negroes,
in Charleston, South Carolina, a characteristic story of the beginning
of this brickyard. "After I had been teaching a while at Tuskegee," he
said, "I began to feel that I was partly throwing away my time
teaching the students only books, without getting hold of them in
their home life and without teaching them how to care for their bodies
and how to work. I looked about for some land, and found a farm near
Tuskegee which could be bought. I had no money, but a good friend had
confidence enough in our prospects to loan me five hundred dollars to
pay down toward the land so as to secure it. After that it was not
long before I had the school moved. Then I would teach the boys for a
part of the day, and then for the rest of the time take them out of
doors with me to help clear up the land. In that way we did all the
work we possibly could. When it came to making bricks for a building,
though, we were stuck. We could make the bricks, and did, but none of
us knew how to burn them. For that it was necessary to have a skilled
man, who must be paid. I was out of money by that time, but I owned a
gold watch. This I took to a pawnshop and raised all I could on it.
The money I got was enough to pay a man to burn the bricks and teach
us so that we could do the next ones ourselves. That watch is in pawn
yet, but we have got thirty-eight buildings."
[Illustration: STUDENTS AT WORK ON NEW TRADES-SCHOOL BUILDING.]
Another class of young men are learning bricklaying. They take the
bricks as they come from the yard and put up the walls of the
buildings, while the carpenters do the woodwork. The classes in
woodworking are among the most important at the school. The institute
now owns a large tract of valuable timber land, while among the
industrial buildings on the grounds is a good sawmill, equipped with
the necessary machinery. Whatever lumber is needed in the erection of
the buildings is cut on the timber lot, drawn to the mill, and sawed.
In this way one class learns to saw and handle lumber. Besides the
regular carpentry classes, joiner work and carriage-making are carried
on. A large part of the furniture in the buildings, including the
beds, tables, and chairs in the dormitories and dining rooms, was
built in this way. All the carts, wagons, and carriages which are used
about the place were built in the carriage shop, and the hickory
lumber wagons turned out there have so good a reputation that all not
needed on the place are sold readily to be used on the near-by farms.
The carriages are painted, ironed, and trimmed by the young men, and
no better proof of the workmanship can be asked than some of the rides
I have had in them about Tuskegee.
[Illustration: ONE END OF THE DINING HALL AT TUSKEGEE.]
The management at Tuskegee tries to have a building always in course
of construction for the benefit of the building classes. This year
they are erecting a trades-school building. Last year they built a
handsome brick church, which will seat two thousand persons. The
building of this church shows well what the school's building classes
can do. The designs were drawn by Mr. R. R. Taylor, the young colored
man who is the instructor in mechanical and architectural drawing. One
of his pupils designed the cornices with which the building is
finished, and another designed the pews which furnish it. These pews
were built in the school's joiner shop. The bricks were all made in
the school's brickyard, and laid by the students. Men learning slating
and tinsmithing covered the roof, and the steam-heating and electrical
apparatus were also put in by the students, although this is one of
the first of the buildings where the students have been sufficiently
advanced in those trades to do the last-named work.
As it was determined to employ only negroes as instructors at
Tuskegee, it was at first difficult to find enough men and women of
that race skilled in the arts and trades which it was wished to have
taught there, and teachers were brought to the institute from all over
the country. Now, however, as each year sees the industrial classes
better under way, the tide is setting out, and Tuskegee yearly turns
out teachers of trades, both men and women, who are eagerly sought by
other institutions which are coming to see the value of industrial
training. In many cases these teachers go to such positions at lower
wages than they might hope to earn if they went to work at their
trades, but they do this because they feel they have a duty to the
institute and to the friends who have sustained it, to help extend its
influence as widely as lies within their power. The question is often
asked if a negro having learned a trade can find work at it. I do not
think that the Tuskegee students who have thoroughly fitted themselves
feel any anxiety about this. I remember speaking on this subject to
the teacher in the harness-making and saddlery department, a good
workman and a superb physical specimen of a man. He told me that
during the long summer vacations he had left Tuskegee, and had never
had any trouble in getting work and keeping it in shops in Montgomery
and other towns of the State.
[Illustration: A CLASS OF TAILORS.]
Among the buildings at Tuskegee is a foundry and machine shop, which
is always full of work, especially in the way of repairs upon
agricultural machinery for the farmers about Tuskegee, because there
is no other shop of the kind within thirty miles at least which has
facilities for doing such heavy work as this. Printing, tailoring,
blacksmithing, and painting are taught. Since a large proportion of
the students at Tuskegee are young women, arrangements are made to
furnish opportunities for them also to learn to work. They do all the
work of taking care of the dormitories and dining rooms, learn plain
and fancy cooking, candy-making, millinery, dressmaking, and all the
most modern methods of laundry work. One class learns nursing, under
the direction of a capable trained nurse.
[Illustration: "BUILDING A HAT"; MILLINERY DEPARTMENT.]
In speaking of the trades taught at Tuskegee, it should be remembered
that agriculture is reckoned among them, and one of the most
important. A very large percentage of the negroes of the South must
continue to live upon the plantations and gain a living by tilling the
soil. As a general thing their knowledge of how to best do this is
lamentably deficient, and they labor under great disadvantages. They
do not own their land, but rent it at ruinous rates. They mortgage
their crops and eat them up before they are harvested. They plant
nothing but cotton, because that is about the only crop that can be
mortgaged, and are therefore obliged to buy food at any exorbitant
prices which the dealers may demand. Tuskegee tries to remedy these
evils by teaching the young men who come there the best methods of
modern farming. If the farmers' sons can remain only a short time they
carry back to the home plantations some new ideas to put in practice
there; if they can remain for the full term of three or four years,
they are fitted to take full charge of the work on any large
plantation. The institute has a farm on which are raised the crops
best adapted to the soil and climate of that part of the South. The
men who have charge of this work are among the most able in the entire
force of instructors. Mr. C. W. Green, the farm superintendent, has no
superior in the South as a practical farmer. Mr. George W. Carver, the
head of the agricultural department, is a graduate of the Iowa State
College. To my mind, no more valuable text-book for Southern scholars
could be furnished than a little pamphlet which this man has recently
issued, telling how he raised between two hundred and three hundred
bushels of sweet potatoes from an acre of ground, whereas the average
yield of that crop in the same part of the country is less than fifty
bushels to the acre.
[Illustration: AN INSTITUTE CABBAGE FIELD.]
Tuskegee has a large herd of cows and a good dairy and creamery, in
which a class of men receive instruction in dairy work. An incident
which occurred in connection with this dairy furnishes a story which
Mr. Washington likes to tell, because it illustrates a point which he
constantly impresses upon his colored audiences. One of the surest
ways to abolish the color line, he tells his hearers, is to learn to
do some kind of work so well that your services will be really needed.
[Illustration: THE START FROM THE BARN. "FARM STUDENTS."]
"There came to my knowledge," says Mr. Washington, "the fact that the
owners of a certain creamery were in search of an able superintendent.
We had just graduated a man who was thoroughly capable in every way,
but he was just about as black as it is possible for a man to be.
Nevertheless, I sent him on to apply for the place. When he made his
errand known to the owners they looked at him and said:
"'A colored man? Oh, that would never do, you know.'
[Illustration: DAIRYING DIVISION; MAKING BUTTER.]
"The applicant for work said very politely that he had not come there
to talk about his color, but about the making of butter. Still, they
said he would not do.
"Finally, however, something the man said attracted the attention of
the owners of the creamery, and they told him he might stay two weeks
on trial, although they still assured him that there was no
possibility whatever of their hiring a colored man. He went to work,
and when the report for the first week's shipment of butter came
back--would you believe it?--that butter had sold for two cents a
pound more than any butter ever before made at that creamery! The
owners of the establishment said to each other, 'Why, now, this is
very singular!' and waited for the second week. When the returns for
that week came back--a cent a pound more than for the week previous,
three cents a pound more than the creamery's best record before our
man had taken charge of it--they didn't say anything. They just
pocketed the extra dividend, as welcome as it was unexpected, and
hired the man for a term of years. That extra three cents a pound on
the price of the butter he could make had knocked every bit of black
out of the color of his skin so far as they were concerned."
[Illustration: DELEGATES TO THE TUSKEGEE NEGRO CONFERENCE.]
Out of the desire of Mr. Washington to help the struggling negro
farmers has grown one of Tuskegee's greatest institutions--the annual
Negro Conference which assembles there each year. About ten years ago
Mr. Washington invited a few of the negro farmers who lived near
Tuskegee to meet at the institute on a stated day "to talk over
things." Perhaps twenty men accepted the invitation. These men,
gathered in one of the smaller rooms of the institute, under Mr.
Washington's leadership discussed the problems with which they had to
contend, and different ones among them told how they had succeeded or
failed. The meeting was felt to be so helpful that another was planned
for the next year. From that small beginning has developed a
conference which now brings to Tuskegee, in February of each year, two
thousand persons, from a dozen States, and representing many
occupations besides that of farming. These men and women are the
parents of the generation which is at school at Tuskegee and similar
institutions. These fathers and mothers lived "too soon" to be able to
profit by such advantages. Few of them can read or write, and nearly
all of them know by experience what slavery was. They see their
children learning so much which was unattainable for them that they
ask, "Is there no chance for us?" The conference is Tuskegee's attempt
to answer that cry. As one grizzled old negro preacher, whom I heard
make the opening prayer one year, said, "O Lawd, we wants ter tank de
for dis, our one day ob schoolin' in de whole year."
[Illustration: NEGRO CONFERENCE IN SESSION IN TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE
CHURCH.]
Beginning with this year the conferences will be held in the new
church, which will comfortably seat all the delegates. Until this
church was completed, though, there was no audience room at the
institute which would begin to accommodate all who came, and the
sessions were held in a rude temporary building, which was also
utilized for chapel and graduation exercises. Convenient as the new
church is in every way, I shall always miss the unique gathering in
that old pavilion. Imagine a broad, low building of unplaned boards,
its floor the earth, and its seats backless benches made by spiking
planks on to posts driven into the ground. From its rafters hang
masses of Spanish moss, amid which streamers of red, white, and blue
bunting are woven. On the walls are many American flags, looped back
with the spiked leaves of the palmetto tree. Booker Washington stands
on a low platform at one end of the room, and all around him, packed
just as closely as they can be, are the people, while hundreds of late
comers cluster around the doors and open windows like bees around the
opening of a hive. No matter if the benches are backless and hard. No
opera audience in five-dollar chairs ever sat half so interested for
an hour as do these men and women through all the day, which, long as
it is, proves far too short for what they have to say. This is the one
day of the year for them, and not a minute must be wasted. The
speakers are the men and women themselves. Mr. Washington simply
starts the discussions and steers them so as to make all the time
count. He is a genius as a presiding officer, and gets more out of the
limited time than any one else could do. The subjects which they
discuss are the practical ones which concern them most vitally. Some I
have mentioned--non-ownership of land, crop-mortgaging, and the evil
of raising only cotton. Others are the need of a longer school year
and how to get it, the foolish extravagances of buying showy clocks,
sewing machines, and organs before a house is owned to put them in,
and similar subjects. The time is never long enough for all there is
to be said. The effort is to make this a center from which some
helpful thought will be carried out to take root during the year.
[Illustration: "PLAIN-SEWING" ROOM.]
I saw a striking example of the influence which the conference may
exert at one of the sessions. A tall young mulatto woman had finally
succeeded in getting a chance to speak, for there are always twice as
many to talk as can find time. "Last year brother Washington told us,"
said she, "that three acres of land, properly carried on, would
support a person, and told us how, and said that a woman as well as a
man could carry on the land. I made up my mind I'd try it. I did, and
it's so. I hired three acres of land and had it plowed. I had it
plowed deep, too. No lazy nigger half done the job, for I sat on the
ground myself to see it done." She then went on to tell what her seed
and fertilizer had cost, what she planted and raised, and what her
profits were, showing them to be quite enough, as she had said, to
support her for a year.
Loud applause greeted this report, and cries of "Dat's good!" and "Go
ahead, sister!" but through it all the woman was seen to be still
standing where she had spoken, waiting for a chance to go on, and with
no sign of satisfaction in her face at the approval shown her. Raising
one yellow hand high above her head, as soon as she could be heard,
she cried in a strangely thrilling voice, which echoed through the
dusky room: "How can you waste the one day of the year for us in such
foolishness, when the life of a race is in jeopardy? Get to work! We
must learn first to help ourselves, if we want God to help us!"
Hardly had this woman finished speaking when it was seen that another
woman had risen and was waiting for a chance to make herself heard. I
think I never saw a more pitiful figure. Very black, old, with a gaunt
form on which a shabby dress hung loosely, her face was that of a
person for whom life had been so hard that hope was for her a word
unknown. Two or three men in the audience said, "Oh, sit down!" as if
they wondered what such a person could have to say which would not be
a waste of the meeting's time, but she would not sit down. Standing
there until the noise had hushed, she began:
"I wants ter tank Gawd I'se come here ter day an' heard what dat
sister had ter say. I don' know what made me come. I'se nebber been
here before, but I'se so glad I come ter-day! I'se been de mother ob
sixteen chillen. I hain't nebber had a home nor a mule nor eben a
dress dat wa'n't morgiged. My chillen's gone an' lef' me as soon as
dey's growed up, an' now my ole man is gone too. I tought dere wasn't
nuffin lef' for me ter do but jes' die, but now I'se goin' home an'
get some lan' an' do for myself an' my littles' chillens what nobody
has ebber done for me. I kin do it, an' I tank Gawd I'se been here ter
git de word."
It seems to me as if this was missionary work of the best kind, and it
is such work as this that Tuskegee is doing constantly.