I want to find you each day more thoughtful of others, and less selfish. I want you to be more conscientious in your thoughts and in your work, and with regard to your duty toward others. This is growing in the right direction; not doing this is growing in the wrong direction. Nor do I want you to feel that you are to strive for this spirit of growth for this one year alone, or for the time that you are here. I hope that you will continue to grow in the forward direction.
Then, and this is more important still, we want you to take this habit of growth—this disposition to grow in the right direction—out with you from the school, and scatter it as an influence for good wherever you go. We want you to take it into your schools; for many of you are going to become teachers. We want you not only to begin it when you begin teaching in an humble way, but we want to see you grow and improve in it every year. We want to see you make your school-houses more attractive; to see you make everything in connection with your schools and your teaching better and stronger; to see you make a school more useful every year that you remain as its teacher.
Then, too, when you go out and get employment—no matter of what kind it may be—we want to see you grow better in that employment; we want to see you advance in ability, commanding always a larger salary, advancing in value to those who employ you. We want to see you grow in reputation for being honest, conscientious, intelligent, hard-working; no matter in what capacity you are employed.
Some of you are going out to establish homes and settle down in home life. We want to see you grow in that direction. Nothing is so disheartening—there is nothing so discouraging—as to see a man or woman settle down in a home, and then not to see that home grow more beautiful, inside and outside;—to see it, instead of this, each year grow dingy and dirty, because it each year receives less and less attention.
We want Tuskegee students to go out from here and establish homes that will be models in every respect for those about them—homes that will show that the lives of the persons who have established them are models for the lives of those who live about them. If you do this, your lives are going to be a constant going forward; for, I repeat, your lives are going to be one thing or the other, continually going backward or continually going forward.
LAST WORDS
We have come to the close of another school year. Some of you will go out from among us now, not to return. Others will go home for the summer vacation and return at the end of that for the next school year.