Booker T. Washington, a graduate of Hampton, founded the Tuskegee School in Alabama, and over forty other graduates have gone to help him in his work. Schools at Calhoun and Mt. Meigs, Alabama, Kittrell, North Carolina, Lawrenceville and Gloucester, Virginia, are established on the Hampton plan and carried on by graduates of the school. Under the teachers who have gone out from Hampton and its offshoots more than 150,000 children have received instruction. Of the 500 Indians who have been trained at Hampton, 87 per cent. are engaged as teachers, farmers, missionaries, and in other regular occupations. Twenty years ago, Capt. Pratt brought fifteen prisoners of war from Fort Marion, St. Augustine, to Hampton and remained there one year, bringing in the meantime other Indians from the West. So successful was that first experiment in industrial education that Carlisle School was established and now hundreds of thousands of dollars, which were formerly devoted to fighting the Indians, are given by the government to training their children in industrial schools.
Hampton has given an impetus to industrial education among the Negroes which is felt in every State of the South. But 75 per cent. of the race still live in one-room cabins on rented land, in ignorance and poverty. Teachers of agriculture and home builders are needed.
WHEELWRIGHT SHOP.
There is danger that the blacks will lose the trades, which were their best heritage from slavery, unless industrial education is pushed. Well-trained young women must go out to reconstruct the homes.
In addition to the work done by the school directly for its pupils in class-room and industrial-training shop, it reaches out continually into the home life of its graduates and ex-students. Its graduate missionaries visit in many homes, inspiring interest in land purchase, home building, school-term extension, thrift, temperance, and good citizenship. Its monthly paper, the Southern Workman, deals in a spirit of free inquiry and broad humanity with the race question in its many phases, and publishes in its columns articles of value from leading men and women of both the Negro and white races. Its Summer Conference, held in the vacation season, calls together for earnest discussion some of the best thinkers, white and colored, in the country; and the Virginia Teachers' Institute, assembling each summer on the school grounds, keeps the school in touch with the educational system of the State in which it works. Its aim is, and has been from its beginning, to lay firm and broad the foundation of character upon which all true civilization is built.
CHAPTER XXX.
STATE SCHOOLS AND CALHOUN SETTLEMENT—VIRGINIA
NORMAL AND COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE.