The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. A PRACTICAL INSTITUTION-THE WORK IT IS DOING. BY BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Nthe year 1881 the Legislature of Alabama decided to establish a normal school for colored pupils in the town of Tuskegee, in Macon county, and appropriated the sum of $2,000 annually for the support of this school. The members of the Board of Commissioners in whose hands the Legislature had placed the control of this institution, two white men and one colored man, residents of the town of Tuskegee, wrote to the late General S. C. Armstrong, who was then at the head of the Hampton Institute, in Virginia, to know if he could recommend a teacher for the newly established Alabama school. General Armstrong was so good as to recommend me for the place, and after some correspondence I was engaged. I had graduated from the Hampton Institute about four years before that, and after taking a course of advanced study at Wayland College, in Washington, D. C., and teaching for two or three years in my old home in Malden, West Virginia, I had returned to Hampton, at General Armstrong's request and was engaged in teaching the Indian students there. As soon as I could arrange to leave my work at Hampton I came to Alabama. When I arrived at Tuskegee I found that although the Legislature had appropriated money to pay the teacher, it had done nothing in the way of providing a building for the school, furniture, books or apparatus of any kind. These the teacher and the people must secure for themselves. The colored people of the community were greatly pleased at the prospect of having a school and were willing to help in every way that they could, but so far as money was concerned they had but little to give. I finally secured the privilege of using an old abandoned Negro church and one out-buildingneither of which was really a shelter from 114 ་་ ない。 ་་ HELY ALL THE BIBLE TRAINING SCHOOL BUILDING. 237 ver umrei A valued at as an endowment fund De proceeds of which when sold will wives to he endowment fund. The atients have increased to fourteen Mondted each year, and there are in the hborhood of one hundred teachers and auctors, a'l colored men or women, since there no one connected with the instituLion & xcept some of the members of the Boud of Trustees and one or two persons not adent at the school who is not of the Lace which the institution is designed to ed The the schoci the old church grew The students were men and men vic were tid enough to appreciate e cvantages vinch had come so late in te to the most of the They were determined to have mecation. It very ckly became necessary to provide another teacher and increase: accommodations for the school. Miss a Davidson was sent from Hampton to be. and the newly organized classes were bed in the old outbuilding near the chur Both these buildings were so worn with age that when it rained it was often necessary for a pupil to hold an umbrella over the teacher that the lessons could go on. Per as these buildings were, however, they were better than the most of those in which the country colored schools were started. Many of those first schools began their work in brush arbors or under trees. I had not taught this school many weeks when I became convinced that it would be impossible for me to obtain the results I wished unless I could be able to exert a closer and more constant influence on the lives of the pupils than was possible when I came in contact with them merely during the hours of the school day. The pupils, almost without exception, came from oneroom cabin homes in which they could have had no training in habits of personal cleanliness or in right living. They needed to be taught the use and advantages of the bath, the tooth brush, the night shirt, as much as they needed to be taught morality, religion and how to read and write and cipher. In addition to this, almost all of the stu dents were so poor that small as were their expenses while attending the school they could not afford to remain long enough to get much real benefit unless some way could be provided by which they could pay a part or all of their expenses while they were there. Most of them, too, needed to be taught to work, about as much as they much as they needed to be taught books. Many of them had come from small, rented plantations which had been cultivated in a slip-shod way. They knew little of the modern ways of work as I had learned them at Hampton. What they needed, in fact, using the word in its broadest sense, was to learn how to live. While I was studying over the future of the school more and more anxiously every day, a plantation of one hundred acres, situated about one mile out of the town, was offered for sale for $500. I found that I could buy this piece of land by paying only a small part of the money down, and I resolved at once to found a Hampton in Alabama. A friend loaned me the money necessary to make the first payment. I bought the place and moved the school on to it. The plantation house on the place had been destroyed by fire, leaving only three small buildings and a henhouse. The school began its work in these three little old outbuildings, but new scholars came so rapidly that I was soon obliged to have the henhouse cleaned out and utilized as a class room. The removal of the school into these quarters, cramped and inconvenient as they were, made many improvements possible. A considerable number of the students could now live at the school, and I could have them with me all of the time. I taught the young men in the class room a portion of the day, and then took them out of doors to work with me on the land. We cleared up the fields and planted crops. The young women did the housework, the cooking and the laundry work. They had training in sewing and mending, and later, as soon as we could afford it, a sewing machine was bought and they began to have more systematic instruction in sewing and dressmaking. Some one gave us a horse to work on the land, and by degrees tools and supplies were given. The people of the town of Tuskegee and the surrounding country, both white and black, showed their interest by their gifts. When we wanted to open up a clay pit on the place and begin to make bricks, a white man at Tuskegee gave us a whole outfit of brickmaking tools. During all the years that the school has been in operation the relations with the white people in the community have been kindly and helpful. The school kept out-growing its accommodations. We built-largely by our own labor-a three-story wooden building which we named Porter Hall. The basement of this building, damp and dark as it was, we used as a dining room. There was one large room which we used as a chapel and general assembly room; the rest of the building furnished class rooms and sleeping rooms. Gradually the most of these rooms have been outgrown and replaced with better ones. Our dining room-attached to Alabama Hall-affords room for practically all of the students to sit down at one time. The chapel, outgrown again and again, is now a beautiful and commodious brick structure capable of seating 2,400 persons. Some of the executive offices still remain in Porter Hall, although much cramped, but during the past year the money has been given by a friend of the school to build a large and convenient Administration Building, and the students are already at work upon it. Very recently, too, Mrs. C. P. Huntington has signified her wish to give the money to erect an Academic Building at Tuskegee in memory of her husband, the late C. P. Huntington, the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, to be known as the C. P. Huntington Memorial Building. Mr. Huntington was one of the best friends the school has had. Besides innumerable smaller gifts of money and machinery, he gave $50,000 to the endowment fund not long before his death, and Mrs. Huntington gave the money to build Huntington Hall, our finest dormitory for girls. The sum which she has now put in the hands of the school is sufficient to build-of brick-the largest and finest building which the school has yet had provided. When this building is erected, Porter Hall, which has done us such good service for twenty years, will probably be removed. When we began to make plans for our second building I determined that, unlike Porter Hall, it should be of brick, being much more durable. We opened up much more widely the clay pit in which we had been at work, made Our Own bricks and built Alabama Hall, now one of our dormitories for girls. Since then all of our large buildings but one have been of brick, made by ourselves. Into one building the chapel-we put one million, two hundred thousand bricks. In addition to what we have used ourselves we have made many hundred thousand bricks to be sold for use in the surrounding country. Not long ago one of our graduates who had gone into business as a grocer in Tuskegee town, and had built up a good trade there, decided to build a brick block. He placed an order with Us for one hundred thousand bricks, and accompanied the order with a check to pay for the whole bill. This man, I may add, is among the most successful merchants in the town, and no one there would question his credit. work at some trade or industry six At first the students were not anxious for At The young men who work Every student, however, no matter THE BRICKYARD AT TUSKEGEE. a badge of servitude to be avoided. They were apt to think that getting an education meant acquiring a smattering of Latin and Greek, and that its chief object was to enable one to live a life of ease. An old Negro coming in from boeing in the fields one very hot day was heard exclaim: "De sun am so hot, ar de cot ton am so grassy, dat dis darkey beves he am called to preach." Too many of the early teachers as we.. as preachers were "called" for similar rea sons. Conditions in this respect, thoug are rapidly growing better in the South During the days of slavery there was as old colored man who wanted to learn to play on the guitar, and who went to & WES 10 】 white man who was a good musician, with the request that he give him lessons. The young man, because he did not think that the slave, at his age, could learn enough about the guitar to make it worth while for him to try, endeavored to discourage him indirectly by telling him: "Very well, Sam, I will give you lessons, since you wish me to, but I shall have to charge you two dollars for the first lesson, one dollar for the next, fifty cents for the third lesson, and twentyfive cents for the last lesson." "Dat's all right, boss," said the Negro. "I 'gages you on dem terms. But boss, I wants to ax you one thing. I wants yo' to be sure an' give me dat 'ere las' lesson first." This man Sam was a type of the race in the earlier days of freedom. The men and women of that time simply wanted to get the last lesson first. The mass of the Negro race is coming to see now that there must be a firm foundation laid in industry, in the ownership of property and in right habits of living. The students of to-day seek industrial education. In almost all of the trades there are more applicants than we can accommodate. In the early days of the school the students were glad to work, it is true, but it was as a means to an end. Now, in addition to this, they realize the dignity and beauty of work for work's own sake. A few days ago the annual industrial exercises for the present year were held-those which correspond to the usual Commencement exercises in a purely academic school. Our commodious chapel was crowded for the occasion. The governor of the State, Hon. W. D. Jelks, was present, and spoke most encouraging words. With the governor were some of the most successful business men of the South, the State Superintendent of Education, and several of the most notable educators in the State. The prominent citizens of Tuskegee and the neighboring community to the number of several hundred were present. Mr. Robert C. Ogden, of New York, and a party of distinguished educators and philanthropists who had been attending the Southern Educational Conference at Athens, Georgia, were present, and with all these hundreds of parents and friends of the students. work, iron-work and trimming, in the shops of the school by students. They saw castings from the foundry, and dresses and bonnets from the dressmaking and millinery shops. They saw an incubator in operation, and coops of a dozen or more varieties of standard-bred fowls. They saw an ingenious steam engine running, the work of one of the students in the machine shop, in which he has embodied novel and valuable inventions of his own. They saw shoes, and boots, and harness, and suits of clothes, and butter and cream, and vegetables, and fruit trees. And among all these things they saw move about young men in overalls and young women in calico dresses and work aprons who demonstrated by actual work that they knew how to use the tools and make the articles to be seen upon the platform. A graduate of the agricultural department brought upon the stage a large and unique reproduction of a model farm, with the various crops growing, and explained how each should be treated to get the best results, and what these results ought to be. A young woman discussed the best methods of raising poultry, illustrating her talk with eggs, live fowls and an incubator in operation. Another young woman cooked. A wheelwright showed how a pony phaeton should be built, and another explained the invention and operation of the engine to which I have referred, which, as he had connected it for What did these people see? They saw, first, the roomy platform in the chapel covered with the products of the industry of chine shop, was in motion. A young the Institute and the instruments with which woman illustrated by actual work the most those products are obtained. They saw a approved methods of scientific and wholecomplete, double carriage, made, wood- some laundry work. Two young men the occasion with the boiler room of the ma |