By M. B. THRASHER.
Tuskegee is a county town in the State of Alabama, not far from Montgomery. It is near the center of that part of the South commonly spoken of as the "black belt," because the negro inhabitants there greatly outnumber the whites. The town is one of the oldest in the South. It is said, in fact, that when De Soto made his famous journey across that part of the newly discovered continent he found an Indian village of the same name on the site of the present town. Tuskegee is five miles from the main line of the Southern Railroad, with which it is connected at Chehaw by means of a narrow-gauge road.
The Faculty of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.
Tuskegee, as the word is oftenest used now, means the Normal and Industrial Institute, situated a mile out from the town and forming a little settlement in itself. This is the great school for young negro men and women which Booker T. Washington has built up, and of which he is the principal. The pupils who attend number a thousand each year. It is the largest school for colored people, managed by colored people, in the United States. There is no one connected with the school, except some of the members of the board of trustees, who is not of the race which the institute is designed to help.
Tuskegee Institute is so entirely the result of Booker T. Washington's labors, and his life has been so interwoven with the development of the school, that a brief account of his boyhood and youth is almost indispensable to a complete description of the institute, particularly as the conditions with which he struggled were so generally those which confronted all of the negroes at that time.
President Booker T. Washington.
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia, not long before the breaking out of the war. It seems strange that a man who is so widely known to-day and is so universally respected as Mr. Washington, when asked how old he is should be obliged to reply that he does not know, yet such is the case. The birth of one more black babies on a large plantation at that time was a matter of too little moment to have sufficient notice taken of it to accurately fix the date. He was a boy old enough during the war, though, to know something of the struggle going on around him, for, speaking in public of Lincoln once, I heard him say: "My first acquaintance with our hero was this: Night after night, before the dawn of day, on an old slave plantation in Virginia, I recall the form of my sainted mother bending over the bundle of rags that enveloped my body, on a dirt floor, breathing a fervent prayer to Heaven that 'Massa Lincoln' might succeed, and that some day she and I might be free."
