At these conferences the most elementary subjects are discussed. Booker Washington would tell and have told to these farmers matters which one would naturally assume any farmers, however ignorant, must already know. He never tried to deceive himself as to the woful ignorance of the Negro masses, and still he was never discouraged, but always said ignorance was not a hopeless handicap because it could be overcome by education. While he frankly although sadly acknowledged the lamentable ignorance of the rank and file of his race, particularly those on the soil and dependent for education upon the short-term, ill-equipped, and poorly taught rural Negro school, he as stoutly denied and constantly disproved the assertion that these ignorant masses were not capable of profiting by education. He earnestly strove and signally succeeded in attracting to these great annual agricultural conferences the most pathetically ignorant of the Negro farmers as well as the leading scientific agriculturists of the race. But he always insisted that the meetings be conducted for the benefit of the ignorant and not in the interests of the learned.
He would, for instance, tell the attendants at the conferences what to plant and when to plant it, and what live stock to keep and how to keep it. He would have printed and distributed among them a "Farmer's Calendar" which gave the months in which the various standard vegetables should be planted and what crops should be used in rotation. He constantly insisted that the Experiment Station at Tuskegee Institute, supported by the State of Alabama, should not be used for scientific experiments of interest only to experts, but should deal with the fundamental problems with which the Negro farmers of Alabama were daily confronted. The titles of some of the Experiment Station Bulletins selected at random suggest the homely and practical nature of the information disseminated. Half a dozen of them read as follows: "Possibilities of the Sweet Potato in Macon County, Alabama," "How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption," "How to Raise Pigs with Little Money," "When, What, and How to Can and Preserve Fruits and Vegetables in the Home," "Some Possibilities of the Cowpea in Macon County, Alabama," "A New and Prolific Variety of Cotton." And all of these bulletins, so many of which deal with the problems of the home, are written by an old bachelor of pure African descent, without a drop of white blood, who in himself refutes two popular fallacies: the one that bachelors cannot be skilled in domestic affairs, and the other, that pure-blooded Africans cannot achieve intellectual distinction. This man is George W. Carver, who is not only the most eminent agricultural scientist of his race in this country, but one of the most eminent of any race. His work is so well known in scientific circles in his field throughout the world that when leading European scientists visit this country, particularly the Southern States, they not infrequently go out of their way to look him up. They are usually very much surprised to find their eminent fellow-scientist a black man.
The last of these conferences over which Booker Washington presided was held at Tuskegee, January 20 and 21, 1915. A woman, the wife of a Negro farmer, was testifying when she said: "Our menfolks is foun' out dat they can't eat cotton." As the outburst of laughter which greeted this remark died down, Mr. Washington said in his incisive way: "What do you mean?" The woman replied: "I mean dat we womenfolks been tellin' our menfolks all de time dat they should raise mo to eat."
She then displayed specimens of canned fruits and told how she had put up enough of them to supply her family until summer. She told of having sold thirty-six turkeys and of selling two and three dozen eggs each week, with plenty left over for her family. She said that she and her husband had raised and sold hogs, and still had for their own use more than enough pork to last them until the next hog-killing time.
"How often do you eat chicken?" asked Dr. Washington.
"We can eat chicken every day if we want it," she replied.
When she had finished Mr. Washington explained that all this had been done on 178 acres of the poorest land in Macon County.
In his opening address at this conference Mr. Washington denounced "petty thieving, pistol-toting, crap-shooting, the patronizing of 'blind tigers,' and unnecessary lawsuits" as some of the weights and encumbrances which are keeping the Negro from running well the race which is set before him.
These are some of the basic questions which Booker Washington placed before the conference for discussion:
"How and why am I so hard hit by the present hard times?"