"There came to my knowledge," says Mr. Washington, "the fact that the owners of a certain creamery were in search of an able superintendent. We had just graduated a man who was thoroughly capable in every way, but he was just about as black as it is possible for a man to be. Nevertheless, I sent him on to apply for the place. When he made his errand known to the owners they looked at him and said:
"'A colored man? Oh, that would never do, you know.'
Dairying Division; making Butter.
"The applicant for work said very politely that he had not come there to talk about his color, but about the making of butter. Still, they said he would not do.
"Finally, however, something the man said attracted the attention of the owners of the creamery, and they told him he might stay two weeks on trial, although they still assured him that there was no possibility whatever of their hiring a colored man. He went to work, and when the report for the first week's shipment of butter came back—would you believe it?—that butter had sold for two cents a pound more than any butter ever before made at that creamery! The owners of the establishment said to each other, 'Why, now, this is very singular!' and waited for the second week. When the returns for that week came back—a cent a pound more than for the week previous, three cents a pound more than the creamery's best record before our man had taken charge of it—they didn't say anything. They just pocketed the extra dividend, as welcome as it was unexpected, and hired the man for a term of years. That extra three cents a pound on the price of the butter he could make had knocked every bit of black out of the color of his skin so far as they were concerned."
Delegates to the Tuskegee Negro Conference.
Out of the desire of Mr. Washington to help the struggling negro farmers has grown one of Tuskegee's greatest institutions—the annual Negro Conference which assembles there each year. About ten years ago Mr. Washington invited a few of the negro farmers who lived near Tuskegee to meet at the institute on a stated day "to talk over things." Perhaps twenty men accepted the invitation. These men, gathered in one of the smaller rooms of the institute, under Mr. Washington's leadership discussed the problems with which they had to contend, and different ones among them told how they had succeeded or failed. The meeting was felt to be so helpful that another was planned for the next year. From that small beginning has developed a conference which now brings to Tuskegee, in February of each year, two thousand persons, from a dozen States, and representing many occupations besides that of farming. These men and women are the parents of the generation which is at school at Tuskegee and similar institutions. These fathers and mothers lived "too soon" to be able to profit by such advantages. Few of them can read or write, and nearly all of them know by experience what slavery was. They see their children learning so much which was unattainable for them that they ask, "Is there no chance for us?" The conference is Tuskegee's attempt to answer that cry. As one grizzled old negro preacher, whom I heard make the opening prayer one year, said, "O Lawd, we wants ter tank de for dis, our one day ob schoolin' in de whole year."
