"It was like this," he said. "Next year I went to the Atlanta Exposition. While there I heard Mr. Washington speak, and learned about his school where negro boys could learn a trade. I had always been at a disadvantage because I did not know how to do any kind of work really well. So I came here and began to learn carpentering. I have the trade nearly learned now, and when I graduate from here I shall know how to really work."
Soon after beginning my long car ride from Tuskegee back to the North I stepped into the mail car on the train to post some letters. The envelopes I had used bore the imprint of Tuskegee Institute in the corner. As I handed them to the postal clerk, he glanced at the printing in the corner and exclaimed: "I say, that Booker Washington is a wonderful man, isn't he? I never saw him, but he's teaching those people there to work." Then he went on to tell me about a young colored man whom he had known who had gone to Tuskegee and learned harness-making, and then come home to set up business for himself. This man told me later that he had never been farther north than Louisville.
It seemed to me as if here was an interesting coincidence of unsought testimony, and all tending to show how consistently Tuskegee teaches a gospel of work. Industrial training goes hand in hand there, with mental and moral teaching, in earnest effort to help the thousand young negro men and women there and make their lives count for the most possible for themselves and their race.
A Class in Mental Philosophy.
Any one who has heard Mr. Washington speak at any length to audiences of his own race knows how earnestly he advocates industrial education for the negro. As might be expected, then, we find at Tuskegee practical hand training. The advantage is twofold. The students not only learn to work, but in doing so many are enabled to work out all or a part of the expenses which otherwise in many cases would have prevented them from remaining at the school.
Armstrong Hall. One of the oldest buildings at Tuskegee.
Of the thirty-eight buildings at Tuskegee, all but the first three, and these are among the smallest ones, have been built by the students. Several of the largest of these buildings are of brick, and the educational process begins in the institute's own brickyard, where a class of muscular young men are making bricks under the direction of a capable instructor, and in making them learn the trade which they expect to follow in after life. This yard not only makes all the bricks the institute uses, but many thousand more to be sold each year for use in the surrounding country.
