INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION OF THE BLACKS.

It hardly seems fitting for you to associate my history and thought with those of Alexander Hamilton, one of the great men not born to die. And yet it may not seem immodest in me to suggest that the great and lowly, the rich and poor, the white and black, the ex-master and the ex-slave, have this in common, that each in his own way, and in his own generation, can put forth his highest efforts to serve humanity in the way that our country most needs service; in this all of us can be equal-in this all can be great. If any of you have the faintest idea that I have come here in the capacity of an instructor along any line of education I wish you to part with such an impression at once. My history and opportunity have not fitted me to be your teacher; the most that I can do is to give you a few facts out of my humble experience and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I was born a slave on a plantation in Virginia, in 1857 or 1858, I think. My first memory of life is that of a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor and a hole in the center that served as a winter home for sweet potatoes, and, wrapped in a few rags on this dirt floor I spent my nights, and, clad in a single garment, about the plantation I often spent my days. The morning of freedom came, and though a child, I recall vividly my appearance with that of forty or fifty slaves before the veranda of the "big house" to hear read the documents that made us men instead of property. With the long prayed for freedom in actual possession, each started out into the world to find new friends and new homes. My mother decided to locate in West Virginia, and after many days and nights of weary travel we found ourselves among the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. Soon after reaching West Virginia I began work in the coal mines for the support of my mother.

While doing this I heard in some way, I do not now remember how, of General Armstrong's school at Hampton, Va. I heard at the same time, which impressed me most, that it was a school where a poor boy could work for his education, so far as his board was concerned. As soon as I heard of Hampton I made up my mind that in some way I was going to find my way to that institution. I began at once to save every nickel I could get hold of. At length, with my own savings and a little help from my brother and mother, I started for Hampton, although at the time I hardly knew where Hampton was or how much it would cost to reach the school. After walking a portion of the distance, traveling in a stage coach and cars the remainder of the journey, I at length found myself in the city of Richmond, Va. I also found myself without money, friends, or a place to stay all night. The last cent of my money had been expended. After walking about the city till midnight, and growing almost discouraged and quite exhausted, I crept under a sidewalk and slept all that night. The next morning, as good luck would have it, I found myself near a ship that was unleading pig iron. I applied to the captain for work, and he gave it, and I worked on this ship by day and slept under the sidewalk by night, till I had earned money enough to continue my way to Hampton, where I soon arrived with a surplus of 50 cents in my pocket.

I at once found General Armstrong, and told him what I had come for, and what my condition was. In his great hearty way he said that if I was worth anything he would give me a chance to work my way through that institution. At Hampton I found buildings, instructors, industries provided by the generous; in other words, the chance to work for my education. While at Hampton I resolved, if God permitted me to finish the course of study, I would enter the far South, the black belt of the Gulf States, and give my life in providing as best I could the same kind of chance for self-help for the youth of my race that I found ready for me when I went to Hamp; ton, and so in 1881 I left Hampton and went to Tuskegee and started the Normal and Industrial Institute in a small church and shanty, with 1 teacher and 30 students. Since then the institution of Tuskegee has grown till we have connected with the institution 69 instructors and 800 young men and women, representing 19 States; and, if I add the families of our instructors, we have on our grounds constantly a population of about 1,000 souls. The students are about equally divided between the sexes, and their average is 18 years. In planning the course of training at Tuskegee we have steadily tried to keep in view our condition and our needs rather than pattern our course of study directly after that of a people whose opportunities of civilization have been far different and far superior to ours. From the first, industrial or hand training has been made a special feature of our work.

This industrial training, combined with the mental and religious, to my mind has several emphatic advantages. At first few of the young men and women who came to us would be able to remain in school during the nine months and pay in cash the $8 per month charged for board. Through our industries we give them the chance

Industrial Institute, at the dinner in honor of Alexander Hamilton, Brooklyn, N. Y., January, 1890, An address delivered by Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee (Ala.) Normal and

of working out a portion of their board and the remainder they pay in cash. We find by experience that this institution can furnish labor that has economic value to the institution and gives the student a chance to learn something from the labor within itself. For instance, we cultivate by the labor of our students this year about 600 acres of land. This land is not only cultivated in a way to bring in return to our boarding department, but the farm, including stock raising, dairying, fruit growing, etc., is made a constant object lesson for our students and the people in that section of the South. A three-story brick building is now going up, and the bricks for this building are manufactured at our brick yard by students, where we have made 1,500,000 brick this season. The brick masonry, plastering, sawing, sawing of lumber, carpenters' work, painting, tinsmithing, in fact everything connected with the erection of this building is for permanent use, and the students have the knowledge of the trades entering into the erection of such a building. While the young men do this, the girls to a large extent make, mend and laundry their clothing, and in that way are taught these industries.

Now, this work is not carried on in a miscellaneous or irregular manner. At the head of each industrial department we have a competent instructor, so that the student is not only learning the practical work but is taught as well the underlying principles of each industry. When the student is through with brick masonry he not only understands the trade in a practical way, but also mechanical and architectural drawing to such an extent that he can become a leader in this industry. All through the classroom work is dovetailed in the industrial-the chemistry teaching made to tell on the farm and cooking, the mathematics in the carpentry department, the physics in the blacksmishing and foundrying. Aside from the advantage mentioned, the industrial training gives to our students respect and love for laborhelps them to get rid of the idea so long prevalent in the South that labor with the hands is rather degrading, and this feeling as to labor being degrading is not, I might add, altogether original with the black man of the South. The fact that a man goes into the world conscious of the fact that he has within him the power to create a wagon or a house gives him a certain moral backbone and independence in the world that he would not possess without it.

While friends of the North and elsewhere have given us money to pay our teachers and to buy material which we could not produce, still very largely by the labor of the students, in the way I have attempted to describe, we have built up within about fourteen years a property that is now valued at $225,000; 37 buildings, counting large and small, located on our 1,400 acres of land, all except three of which are the product of student labor. The annual expense of carrying on this work is now about $70,000 a year. The whole property is deeded to an undenominational board of trustees, who have control of the institution. There is no mortgage on any of the property. Our greatest need is for money to pay for teaching.

What is the object of all this? In everytning done in literary, religious, or industrial training the question kept constantly before all is that the institution exists for the purpose of training a certain number of picked leaders who will go out and reach in an effective manner masses by whom we are surrounded. It is not a practical nor desirable thing for the North to educate all the negroes in the South, but it is a perfectly practical and possible thing for the North to help the South educate the leaders, who in turn will go out and reach the masses and show them how to lift themselves up. In discussing this subject it is to be borne in mind that 85 per cent of the colored people South live practically in the country districts, where they are difficult to reach except by special effort. In some of the counties in Alabama, near Tuskegee, the colored outnumber the whites four and five to one.

In an industrial sense, what is the condition of these masses? The first year our people received their freedom they had nothing on which to live while they grew their first cotton crop; funds for the first crop were supplied by the storekeeper or former master, a debt was created; to secure the indebtedness a lien was given on the cotton crop. In this way we got started in the South what is known as the mortgage or crop lien system-a system that has proved a curse to the black and white man ever since it was instituted. By this system the farmer is charged a rate of interest that ranges from 15 to 40 per cent. By this system you will usually find three-fourths of the people mortgage their crops from year to year, as many deeply in debt and living in one-roomed cabins on rented land. By this system debts and extravagances are encouraged, and the land is impoverished and values fall. The schools in the country districts rarely last over three and one-half months in the year, and are usually taught in a church or a wreck of a log cabin or under a brush arbor. My information is that each child entitled to attend the public schools in Massachusetts has spent on him each year between $18 and $20. In Alabama each colored child has spent on him this year about 71 cents, and the white children but a few cents more. Thus far in my remarks I have been performing a rather ungracions task in stating conditions without suggesting a remedy. What is the remedy for the state of things I have attempted to describe?

If the colored people got any good out of slavery it was the habit of work. In this respect the masses of the colored people are different from most races among whom missionary effort is made, in that the negro as a race works. You will not find anything like that high tension of activity that is maintained here; still the negro works, whether the call for labor comes from the rice swamps of the Carolinas, the cotton plantations of Alabama, or the sugar cane bottoms of Louisiana, the negro is ready to answer it-yes, toil is the badge of all his tribe, though he may do his work in the most shiftless and costly manner, still with him it is labor. I know you will find a class around railroad stations and corners of streets that loaf, just as you will find among my people, and we have got some black sheep in our flock, as there are in all flocks, but the masses in their humble way are industrious.

The trouble centers here: Through the operations of the mortgage system, high rents, the allurements of cheap jewelry and bad whisky, and the gewgaws of life, the negro is deprived of the results of his labor. Unused to self-government, unused to the responsibility of controlling our own earnings or expenditures, or even our own children, it could not be expected that we could take care of ourselves in all respects for several generations. The great need of the negro to-day is intelligent, unselfish leadership in his educational and industrial life.

Let me illustrate, and this is no fancy sketch: Ten years ago a young man born in slavery found his way to the Tuskegee school. By small cash payments and work on the farm he finished the course with a good English education and a practical and theoretical knowledge of farming. Returning to his country home where fivesixths of the citizens were black, he still found them mortgaging their crops, living on rented land from hand to mouth, and deeply in debt. School had never lasted longer than three months, and was taught in a wreck of a log cabin by an inferior teacher. Finding this condition of things, the young man to whom I have referred took the three months public school as a starting point. Soon he organized the older people into a club that came together every week. In these meetings the young man instructed as to the value of owning a home, the evils of mortgaging, and the importance of educating their children. He taught them how to save money, how to sacrifice to live on bread and potatoes until they could get out of debt, begin buying a home, and stop mortgaging. Through the lessons and influence of these meetings, the first year of this young man's work these people built up by their contributions in money and labor a nice frame schoolhouse that replaced the wreck of a log cabin. The next year this work was continued and those people, out of their own pockets, added two months to the original three months' school term. Month by month has been added to the school term till it now lasts seven months every year. Already fourteen families within a radius of 10 miles have bought and are buying homes, a large proportion have ceased to mortgage their crops and are raising their own food supplies. In the midst of all was the young man educated at Tuskegee, with a model cottage and a model farm that served as an example and center of light for the whole community.

My friends, I wish you could have gone with me some days ago to this community and have seen the complete revolution that has been wrought in their industrial, educational, and religious life by the work of this one teacher, and I wish you could have looked with me into their faces and seen them beaming with hope and delight. I wish you could have gone with me into their cottages, containing now two and three rooms, through their farms, into their church and Sunday school. Bear in mind that not a dollar was given these people from the outside with which to make any of these changes; they all came about by reason of the fact that they had this leader, this guide, this Christian, to show them how to utilize the results of their own labor, to show them how to take the money that had hitherto been scattered to the wind in mortgaging, high rents, cheap jewelry and whisky, and to concentrate in the direction of their own uplifting. My people do not need or ask for charity to be scattered among them; it is very seldom you ever see a black hand in any part of this country reached forth for alms. It is not for alms we ask, but for leaders who will lead and guide and stimulate our people till they can get upon their own feet. Wherever they have been given a leader, something of the kind I have described, I have never yet seen a change fail to take place, even in the darkest community.

In our attempt to elevate the South one other thing must be borne in mind. I do not know how you find it here, but in Alabama we find it a pretty hard thing to make a good Christian of a hungry man. I think I have learned that we might as well settle down to the uncompromising fact that our people will grow in proportion as we teach them that the way to have the most of Jesus, and in a permanent form, is to mix in with their religion some land, cotton, and corn, a house with two or three rooms, and a little bank account; with these things interwoven with our religion there will be a foundation for growth on which we can build for all time. What I have tried to indicate are some of the lessons that we are disseminating into every corner of the black belt of the South, through the work of our graduates and

through the Tuskegee negro conference, that brings together at Tuskegee once a year 500 of the representatives of the black yeomanry of the South to lay plans, to get light and encouragement, and thus add the strength of mothers and fathers to the strength of the schoolroom and pulpit. More than anything else Tuskegee is a great college settlement dropped into the midst of a mass of ignorance that is gradually but slowly leavening the whole lump.

Of this you can be sure that it matters not what is said the black man is doing or 3 not doing, regardless of entanglements or discouragements, the rank and file of my race is now giving itself to the acquiring of education, character, and property in a way that it has never done since the dawn of our freedom. The chance that we ask is, by your help and encouragement, to be permitted to move on unhindered and unfettered for a few more years, and with this chance, if the Bible is right and God is true, there is no power that can permanently stay our progress. Neither here nor in any part of the world do people come into close relations with a race that is to a large extent empty handed and empty headed. One race gets close to nother in proportion as they are drawn in commerce, in proportion as the one gets hoid of something that the other wants or respects-commerce, we must acknowledge, in the light of history, is the great forerunner of civilization and peace. Whatever friction exists between the black man and white man in the South will disappear in proportion as the black man by reason of his intelligence and skill, can Create something that the white man wants or respects; can make something, instead of all the dependence being on the other side. Despite all her faults, when it comes to business pure and simple, the South presents an opportunity to the negro for busiLess that no other section of the country does. The negro can sooner conquer Southen prejudice in the civilized world than learn to compete with the North in the business world. In field, in factory, in the markets, the South presents a better opportunity for the negro to earn a living than is found in the North. A young man educated in head, hand, and heart, goes out and starts a brickyard, a blacksmith shop, a wagon shop, or an industry by which that black boy produces something in the community that takes the white man dependent on the black man for somethingproduces something that interlocks, knits the commercial relations of the races together, to the extent that a black man gets a mortgage on a white man's house that he can foreclose at will; well, the white man won't drive the negro away from the polls when he sees him going up to vote. There are reports to the effect that in Some sections the black man has difficulty in voting and having counted the little white ballot which he has the privilege of depositing about twice in two years, but there is a little green ballot that he can vote through the teller's window three hundred and thirteen days in every year, and no one will throw it out or refuse to count it. The man that has the property, the intelligence, the character, is the one that is going to have the largest share in controlling the Government, whether he is white or black, or whether in the North or South.

It is important that all the privileges of the law be ours. It is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. Says the great teacher: "I will draw all men unto me." How? Not by force, not by law, not by superficial glitter. Following in the tracks of the lowly Nazarine, we shall contine to work and wait, till by the exercise of the higher virtues, by the products of our brain and hands, we make ourselves so valuable, so attractive to the American nation, that instead of repelling we shall draw men to us because of our intrinsic Worth. It will be needless to pass a law to compel men to come into contact with a negro who is educated and has $200,000 to lend. In some respects you already acknowledge that as a race we are more powerful, have a greater power of attraction, than your race. It takes 100 per cent of Anglo-Saxon blood to make a white Ameri can. The minute that it is proved that a man possesses one one-hundredth part of negro blood in his veins it makes him a black man; he falls to our side; we claim him. The 99 per cent of white blood counts for nothing when weighed beside 1 per cent of negro blood.

None of us will deny that immediately after freedom we made serious mistakes. We began at the top. We made these mistakes, not because we were black people, But because we were ignorant and inexperienced people. We have spent time and money attempting to go to Congress and State legislatures that could have better been spent in becoming the leading real estate dealer or carpenter in our own county. We have spent time and money in making political stump speeches and in attending political conventions that could better have been spent in starting a dairy farm or and demanded our rights. When a man eats another person's food, wears another's clothes, and lives in another's house, it is pretty hard to tell how he is going to vote Gentlemen of the club, the practical question that comes home to you, and to me 38 an humble member of an unfortunate race, is, how can we help you in working ont the great problem that concerns 10,000,000 of my race, and 60,000,000 of yours.

or whether he votes at all.