Working With the Hands / Being a Sequel to "Up from Slavery," Covering the Author's Experiences in Industrial Training at Tuskegee

by Booker T. Washington

"To raise our food supplies, such as corn, potatoes, syrup, pease, hogs, chickens, etc., at home rather than to go in debt for them at the store.

"To stop throwing away our time and money on Saturdays by standing around towns, drinking and disgracing ourselves in many other ways.

"To oppose, at all times, the excursion and camp-meeting, and to try earnestly to secure better schools, better teachers, and better preachers.

"To try to buy homes, to urge upon all Negroes the necessity of owning homes and farms, and not only to own them, but to beautify and improve them.

"Since the greater number of us are engaged in agriculture, we urge the importance of stock and poultry raising, the teaching of agriculture in the country schools, the thorough cultivation of a small acreage, rather than the poor cultivation of a large one, attention to farm-work in winter, and getting rid of the habit of living in one-room houses.

"We urge more protection to life and property, better homes for tenants, and that home life in the country be made more attractive, all this with the view of keeping such great numbers of our people out of the large cities.

"In connection with the better schools and churches, we emphasise the need of careful attention to the morals of our ministers and teachers, and all others acting in the capacity of leaders.

"Prosperity and peace are dependent upon friendly relations between the races, and to this end we urge a spirit of manly forbearance and mutual interest."

What these conferences are doing, and what sort of people are coming to them every year, may be gathered from some of their experiences as they have told them themselves during their visit to Tuskegee. Some of the best things are said by men and women who have succeeded in working their way up from abject poverty to comfortable independence. There is no better antidote for the foolish talk so often heard about the inevitable shiftlessness of the Negro race than these short and pithy narratives of sacrifice, struggle and achievement. A Florida man said that he had six dollars when he married. He now owns two hundred acres and a home of seven rooms. "I did without most everything until I got it paid for," he explained. He has fifty-seven head of cattle, six work horses, and five colts, all raised by himself. Is it dangerous to give the ballot to that kind of a citizen? Will he be apt to use it to promote extravagant taxation?