The great lesson which the race needs to learn in freedom is to work willingly, cheerfully and efficiently. In laying special stress upon hand training for a large proportion of my race, I ask no peculiar education for the Negro, because he is a Negro, but I would advocate the same training for the German, the Jew, or the Frenchman, were he in the same relative stage of racial development as the masses of the Negroes. While insisting upon thorough and high-grade industrial education for a large proportion of my race, I have always had the greatest sympathy with first-class college training and have recognised the fact that the Negro race, like other races, must have thoroughly trained college men and women. There is a place and a work for such, just as there is a place and a work for those thoroughly trained with their hands.
I shall never forget a remark I once heard made by a lady of foreign birth. She had recently arrived in America, and by chance had landed in one of our largest American cities. As she was a woman of considerable importance, she received lavish social attention. For weeks her life was spent in a round of fashionable dressing, dining, automobiling, balls, theaters, art museums, card parties, and what not. When she was quite worn out, a friend took her to visit the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. There she saw students and teachers at work in the soil, in wood, in metal, in leather, at work cooking, sewing, laundering. She saw a company of the most devoted men and women in the world giving their lives in the most unselfish manner, that they might help to put a race on its feet. It was then that she exclaimed in my presence: "What a relief! Here I have found a reality; and I am so glad that I did not leave America before I saw it."
I think I was able to understand something of her feeling. In the history of the Negro race since freedom, one of the most difficult tasks has been to teach the teachers and leaders to exercise enough patience and foresight to keep the race down to a reality, instead of yielding to the temptations to grasp after shadows and superficialities. But the race itself is learning the lesson very fast. Indeed, the rank and file learn faster than some of the teachers and leaders.
SHOE SHOP—MAKING AND REPAIRING
CHAPTER VI Welding Theory and Practice
Broom-making has been recently included among the industries for girls at Tuskegee. Hundreds of brooms were being worn out every year in sweeping the floors of more than seventy buildings; and I venture to say that more brooms were used up for the same amount of floor space than at almost any other institution of the kind. Wherever you may go in the shops, or halls, you will find some one busy with a broom most of the time. The litter in the carpenter shop or the mattress-making room is not allowed to accumulate until the end of the day, but is swept up so often that visitors sometimes ask me whether there is a moment of the working day when some one is not wielding a busy broom somewhere in the institution.