ROSCOE C. BRUCE. Director of the Academic Department.
ROSCOE C. BRUCE.Director of the Academic Department.
The very industries at Tuskegee presuppose aconsiderable range of academic study. Tuskegee does not graduate hoe-hands or plowboys. Agriculture is, of course, fundamental—fundamental in recognition of the fact that the Negro population is mainly a farming population, and of the truth that something must be done to stem the swelling tide which each year sweeps thousands of black men and women and children from the sunlit monotony of the plantation to the sunless iniquity of the slums, from a drudgery that is not quite cheerless to a competition that is altogether merciless. But the teaching of agriculture, even in its elementary stages, presupposes a considerable amount of academic preparation. To be sure, a flourishing garden may be made and managed by bright-eyed tots just out of the kindergarten, but how can commercial fertilizers be carefully analyzed by a boy who has made no study of general chemistry? and how can a balanced ration be adjusted by an illiterate person? Similarly, the girl in the laundry does not make soap by rote, butby principle; and the girl in the dressmaking-shop does not cut out her pattern by luck, or guess, or instinct, or rule of thumb, but by geometry. And so the successful teaching of the industries demands no mean amount of academic preparation. In this lies the technical utility of Tuskegee's Academic Department.
Then, too, a public service has been rendered by Hampton and Tuskegee in showing that industrial training—the system in which the student learns by doing and is paid for the commodities he produces—may be so managed as to educate. Among the excellencies of industrial training, I would state that the severe commercial test in which sentiment plays no part is applied as consistently to the student's labor as is the force of gravitation to a falling body. Here we must keep in mind the unavoidably concrete nature of the product, whether satisfactory or not; the discipline such training affords in organized endeavor; the stimulus it offers to all the virtues of a drudgery which, though it repel an unusually ardent and sensitive temperament, yet wears a precious jewel in its head; and an exceptionally keen sense of responsibility, since on occasion large amounts of money and the esteem of the school at large andthe lives of a student's fellows depend upon his circumspection and skill. Such training educates.
But that would indeed be a sorry program of education which blinked the fact that the student must be rendered responsive to the nobler ideals of the human race, that his eyes must be opened to the immanent values of life. If a clear title to forty acres and a mule represents the extreme upper limit of a black man's ambition, why call him a man? If a bank-account represents the sum of his happiness, that happiness lacks humanity. If you would educate for life, you must arouse spiritual interests. "The life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." Through history and literature the Tuskegee student is brought to develop a criticism, an appreciation of life and the worthier ends of human striving. To such a discipline, however elementary, the critic will not, I take it, begrudge the name "education."
And if the reader wavers in contemplating the problems of trudging Negroes, remember that the type of Negro who is a menace to the community is he who, in moments of leisure, responds to somewhat grosser incentives than the poetry of Longfellow, the romance of Hawthorne, and the philosophy of Emerson. I would reassure your idealism with this counsel of prudence.
Another question presses: Does the value of Tuskegee lie in the fact that the school equips for happy lives merely as many persons as are subjected to the immediate play of its influences; that its circle of efficiency includes only as many as are enrolled in its various courses? To that question every teacher in the school and the mass of graduates and students would give an emphatic, a decisive, No! The real value of the school lies in the service rendered to the people of the communities where our young folks go to live and labor. Now, work in wood and iron, however assiduously prosecuted, never erected in any human being's heart a passion for social service; a finer material must be used, a material finer than gold. And so the plan and deeper intent of Tuskegee Institute are incapable of realization without the incentives supplied by history and literature.
Finally, there is a trade for which the academic studies, supplemented by specific normal instruction, are the direct preparation—teaching school. In the census year there were over 21,000 Negro school-teachers in the United States, and in the decade 1890-1900 the ratio of increase was morethan twice as rapid as that of the Negro population; but, nevertheless, there were in 1900 more than twice as many teachers in the South per 10,000 white children as per 10,000 colored. But such data can not even approximately indicate the relative amounts of teaching enjoyed by these two classes of children, for the statistical method can not express the incalculable disparity in teaching-efficiency.
A friend of mine—a graduate of Brown University—was for several years a member of a board which corrected the examination-papers of Negro candidates for teachers' certificates in a certain Southern State where the school facilities for the Negro population are exceptionally good; but he confessed to me that repeatedly not a paper submitted deserved a passing mark, but the board was "simply compelled to grant certificates in order to provide teachers enough to go around." Nor is such a dearth of black pedagogues in the least extraordinary. The mission of Tuskegee Institute is largely to supply measurably well-equipped teachers for the schools—teachers able and eager to teach gardening and carpentry as well as grammar and arithmetic, teachers who seek to organize the social life of their communitiesupon wholesome principles, tactfully restraining grossness and unobtrusively proffering new and nobler sources of enjoyment. And so the academic studies are wrought into the essential scheme of Tuskegee's work.
Let us inspect with some closeness the organization of the institution. The student-body is fundamentally divided into day-students and night-students. The night-students work in the industries, largely at common labor, all day and every day, and go to school at night, thus paying their current board bills, and accumulating such credits at the Treasurer's office as will later defray their expenses in the day-school. The day-school students are divided perpendicularly through the classes into two sections, section No. 1 working in the industries every other day for three days a week and attending academic classes the remaining three days, while this situation is exactly reversed for section No. 2. Thus every week-day half of each day-school class is in the Academic Department, while the other half is in the Industrial. This arrangement induces a wholesome rivalry between the students of the two sections, and effects an equal distribution of the working force and skill over every week-day.
The day-school students consist, then, of two classes of persons: those who, as night-students, have accumulated credits sufficient to pay their way in the day-school, and those whose families are able to pay a considerable part of their expenses. The earnings of a student in the day-school can not be large enough to pay his current board bill, but such a student is ordinarily enjoying the valuable advantage of working at one of the more skilled trades.
The night-school student, perhaps, because of greater maturity in years and experience, may be relied upon to apply himself with the utmost diligence to his academic studies; so, in much less than half the time-allotment, he advances in his academic studies about half as fast as the day-school student. This schedule did not spring full-fledged from the seething brain of any theorist; it is no fatuous imitation of the educational practise of some remote and presumptively dissimilar institution; it has, so to say, elaborated itself in adjustment to the actual needs of the particular situation. This provision boasts not of novelty, but of utility; though not ideal, it is practicable. But the central fact is that this Tuskegee Plan, while clearly securing ample time for the teaching of the industries,makes possible no mean amount of academic study.
In order more clearly to exhibit the grounds of this proposition, I shall refer in some slight detail to the course of study in English and in Mathematics.
Mathematics represents the group of academic studies which possess direct technical value for the industries; moreover, it is a pretty good index of the grades comprehended in the Academic Department. In the lowest class in the day-school—there is one lower in the night-school—the arithmetical tables are mastered, and fractions introduced and developed with the use of liquid, dry, surface, and time measures; whereas in the Senior class algebra is studied through quadratics and plane geometry through the "area of polygons." That is to say, the lowest day-school class is about equivalent to a fourth grade in the North, and the Senior to the first or the second year (barring the foreign languages) in a Northern high school.
A PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.A PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.
Despite a much smaller time-allotment, our students, roughly speaking, keep pace with Northern students because they are older and somewhat more serious, because the course is shortened by the elimination of uselessly perplexing topics in arithmeticlike compound proportion and cube root, but chiefly because the utility of mathematics is made vivid, and vigorous interest aroused by its immediate application in class-room and shop to problems arising in the industries. Our students are not stuffed like sausages with rules and definitions, mathematical or other; they ascend to general principles through the analysis of concrete cases.
English serves to represent the group of studies that exert a liberalizing influence upon the student, that possess a cultural rather than a technical value. From oral lessons in language in the lower classes, the students advance to a modicum of technical grammar in the middle of the course, and hence to the rhetoric of the Senior year. Moreover, an unusually large amount of written composition is insisted upon, the compositions being used not merely to discipline the student in chaste feeling, consecutive thinking, and efficient expression, but also to sharpen his powers of observation and to stimulate him to pick out of his daily experience the elements that are significant. School readers are used in the lower classes because the readers present economically and compactly a whole gamut of literary styles and forms. These readers are importantly supplemented and gradually superseded by certainclassics appropriate to the grades. The classic, whether Robinson Crusoe, or Ivanhoe, Rip Van Winkle, the House of Seven Gables, or The Merchant of Venice, presents an artistic whole, and permits the students to acquire some sense of literary structure. The dominant motive in literary instruction is, perhaps, esthetic, but I am convinced that the ethical influence of this instruction at Tuskegee is profound and abiding.
However liberal the provisions of the academic curriculum, the value of the department is finally determined by the devotion and ability of the teachers. Universities and normal schools, and the seasoned staffs of public-school systems—from these sources, whether in Massachusetts, California, or Tennessee, Principal Washington has gathered a force of academic teachers of rare ability and devotion. Eminent for personality rather than for method, these teachers are no tyros in method. In such hands the excellent features of the curriculum are raised to the N-th power.
ANOTHER PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.ANOTHER PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.
Finally, academic and industrial teachers are animated with a sentiment of solidarity, with an esprit de corps, which solves many a problem of conflicting duty and jurisdiction, and which must impress the student with the essential unity of Tuskegee'sendeavor to equip men and women for life. The crude, stumbling, sightless plantation-boy who lives in the environment of Tuskegee for three or four years, departs with an address, an alertness, a resourcefulness, and above all a spirit of service, that announce the educated man.
"We wants our baby gal, Mary Lou, to comeup to Tuskegee to git eddicated and learn seamstress; kase we doesn't want her to work lak we is," says the farmer. "I wish to help you plant this new industry, broom-making," writes Miss Susan B. Anthony, "because you are trying so earnestly to teach your girls other means of livelihood besides sewing, housework, and cooking." This is the problem we have been trying to solve at Tuskegee for over twenty years: What handiwork can we give our girls with their academic training that will better fit them to meet the demand for skilled teachers in the various avenues of the industrial and academic world now opening so rapidly to women?
MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Director of Industries for Girls.
MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.Director of Industries for Girls.
Learning to sew, with the ultimate end of becoming a full-fledged dressmaker, has been theheight of ambition with the major part of our girls when brought to the institution by their horny-handed fathers and mothers fresh from the soil of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, or Florida. After the last gripless hand-shake, with the tremulous, "Take care of yourself, honey," the hard-working father and mother have turned their faces homeward, visibly affected by the separation, but resolved to shoulder the sacrifice of the daughter's much-needed help on the plantation, which oftentimes is all that they are able to contribute toward her education.
Not infrequently the girl has begun in the lowest class in night-school. Her parents send her articles of clothing now and then on Christmas; but the largest contributions to her wardrobe come from the boxes and barrels sent to the institution by Northern friends. She has remained in school during the summer vacation, and within two years has entered day-school with enough to her credit to finish her education. When the happy parents return to see their daughter graduated, after six or seven long years, their faces are radiant because of their realized hopes. When they see their white-robed daughter transformed from the girl they brought here clad in the homespun of theold days, and receiving her certificate, the tears come unchecked, and the moving lips no doubt form a whispered prayer.
In a recent class there was graduated a young woman of twenty-five. She came to the school in her eighteenth year from the "piney woods" of Alabama. She entered the lowest preparatory class in night-school and was assigned to work in the laundry. She was earnest and faithful in work and study. She passed on from class to class, remaining at school to work during the vacation. After two years in the laundry she was given an opportunity to learn plain sewing in that division. She was promoted to the Dressmaking Division at the end of the year, and received her certificate at the close of two years, after working every day and attending night-school. She spent the last two years of her school life in the Millinery Division, and received her certificate from that division with one from the Academic Department on her graduation. During these two years she taught the sewing-classes in the night-school of the town of Tuskegee. At the outset she bought the materials used with $1, left over from the sales of the previous year. From this small nest-egg as a starter, seventeen girls were supplied with work. But soefficient and frugal was the young teacher that she sold articles, bought supplies for her class, and ended the year with $3.45 in the treasury.
This is just a leaf from the history of one girl. Of the 520 girls entering the institution during this year (1903-'04), 458 have remained for the full scholastic year. About 50 per cent came from country districts all over the United States. A large majority of them asked to enter the Dressmaking Division to learn that trade; but, after the field of industries was opened to their view, they were scattered about in the different divisions, a very large per cent still leaning to the side of dressmaking and millinery.
Taking into account the number of girls working their way through at their trades by day and attending night-school, they were distributed as follows: Horticulture, 4; training-kitchen, 13; housekeeping, 38; dining-room, 29; hospital, 20; kitchen-gardening, 8; poultry-raising, 7; tailoring, 14; dairying, 10; printing, 6; broom-making, 26; mattress-making, 18; upholstering, 18; laundering, 54; plain sewing, 72; millinery, 51; dressmaking, 69. All the girls were required to take cooking twice a week and 209 of the girls in the normal classes took basketry.
As the trades were the great attraction in the school curriculum, it was deemed necessary to separate the school into two divisions, that students might have an opportunity to receive instruction equally in the Academic and Industrial Departments. This year this scheme worked successfully by an arrangement that placed one division in the Academic Department on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while the other was at work, and the other division in the Trades Department on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, while the other was in school, and so on regularly.
Girl life at Tuskegee is strenuous. Though study and work are constantly to the fore, character is effectively developed with brain and muscle, and the well-earned recreation-hour comes just frequently enough to lend the highest source of pleasure. Though the girl usually comes with a hazy conception of what the days in school will really mean for the ripening of those powers that she earnestly intends to use for the best development of herself, there is always a spirit of learning, that she may be of service to others. That is what counts in the school-days of the average girl in her struggle for more light.
The girl, coming a stranger from her homein the city or country, is lost in a crowd of girls new to dormitory life. New surroundings and new conditions are everywhere. New emotions, new purposes, new resolutions chase one another in her thoughts, and she becomes a stranger to herself only to find her bearings first in her own room. Here Maine and California, far-away Washington and Central America, meet on common ground. Alabama and Georgia alone feel kinship from geographical propinquity.
Beds, one double and one single, chairs, a table, mirror, bookcase, wardrobe, wash-stand, and screen, all manufactured on the grounds, compose the simple furniture of the room. But a few pictures, a strip of carpet before each bed, a bright table-covering, soon give the room the appearance of home, and the untried life has begun. The duty-list assigns to each girl her work, and perhaps the first lessons in order and system will be fairly instituted.
How many and varied are the associations that cluster about the life of the girl in her room, that refuge from a day of discouragement in schoolroom or workshop, and a haven of peace during the quiet hours of the Sabbath! Roommate meets roommate, quick to resent and as quick to forgive—and the petty strife and envy suppressed at birth only serve to discipline them for the coming days.
Up with the rising bell at five, the duties of the room are almost finished when the girl leaves her beds to air while she takes her six o'clock breakfast. Social amenities, the niceties of table-training, and the tricks of speech that betray the sectional birthright, proclaim to the ever-observant table-mates the status of each newcomer, and she rises or falls in estimation just so far as her metal rings true. Thus another element enters into her life, one that will prove a potent force in balancing character; for the frankly expressed criticisms of schoolmates play no small part in the development of students.
If a girl be one of the forty-five waitresses on the eighty-nine tables of the dining-room, she eats her breakfast as the other students march out, then finishes her room-duties and is ready for work at ten minutes of seven wherever she happens to be assigned. If she is a dishwasher, she does that work, waits for inspection of the table that she has set, finishes her room-duty, and is admitted into her work division at half past seven.
Gardening and greenhouse work are becoming so attractive through the Nature-Study classes of the Academic Department that there are constantapplications for transfers from the sewing divisions to this outside work. Equipped in an overall gingham apron and sunbonnet of the same material, the girl begins her duties, and no prouder girl can be found than she who takes her first basket of early spring vegetables to the Teachers' Home.
If the day is to be spent with the whole agricultural force of girls picking strawberries for the tables of the Boarding Department and the local market, the stage takes the group out to the patch two miles back on the farm—and that is happiness unalloyed for the schoolgirl. When she correlates her outing with her school work on the day following, there is seen nature at first-hand in the class-room.
If other classmates have been working in the Plain-Sewing Division turning out cotton underwear and plain articles of clothing to supply the demand of the Salesroom of the institution, the lesson in English has a natural, practical bearing, arising from the fact that one hour has been spent with the theory class of the workroom studying the warp and woof of the materials used, perhaps the sixth or seventh lesson in a series on cotton, introduced to the class first in its native heath. Correlation comes in wherever it may, and the association of ideas obtained in class-room and workroom is closely joined.
The large class of the Dressmaking Division, spending the day from seven until half past five making the blue uniform dresses, filling orders for tailor-made dresses in silk and cloth, measuring, drafting, cutting, and fitting, has many a representative in the schoolroom the succeeding day; and still more is the lesson varied by the practical illustrations in Mathematics or the recital of the experiences of the day in the English classes.
The girl in the millinery work, shaping forms, trimming hats, blending colors, drawing designs, studying textiles and fabrics for analysis in her theory classes twice during her three days of work, finds added inspiration for her three days of class-room study. If she is in the Senior class, she specializes in geometry on her school-days and mechanical drawing on her work-days. When our girl has finished her course in drawing and begins one of the uniform hats worn by the hundreds of girls, she ranks among the first milliners of the land in the estimation of the beginners. She completes hat after hat, drapes them until the number meets the requirement, and then comes her own creation, a pattern hat, undersized of course, but a real dress hat and a thing of beauty. It usually finds its way to the old home for her mother and neighbors to admire. The commendation that comes back to the school is worth its weight in gold.
A CLASS IN MILLINERY.A CLASS IN MILLINERY.
But there are backward learners. Some thereare who excel in embroidery, crocheting, making ties and other fancy articles, but who have no aptitude for shaping and trimming hats. They plod on, and win at last. Then there is the girl whose parents wish her to open a millinery establishment in their town. She tries, but finally agrees with her long-suffering instructor that she would succeed at mattress-making and upholstering instead.
The work in the Mattress Division begins with sheet, pillow-case, table-linen, and comforter-making for the endless demands of the lodging division of the boys and girls. Pulling shucks for the mattress is the next step in advance, and when shucks are covered by the cotton layers in the making, they prove an excellent substitute for the hair filling of a more expensive manufacture, and they have an advantage in the matter of cleanliness. Covering screen frames made in the Carpentry Division for the numerous rooms, caning couches, rockers, and stools, help add to the variety of workin the division. The girl is not awarded her certificate until she has completed the round of work, including the fashioning of a bedroom suite from barrels finally covered with neat-figured denim. The semiweekly theory classes are not unlike those of the plain-sewing division, and the girl is as proud of her achievement with needle, hammer, and saw as if she were an adept in lighter work.
When the machinery was introduced for Broom-making, the girls looked askance at the appliances. But when the broom-corn was delivered from the farm, and the pioneer girl broom-maker began threshing of the seed in the cleaner, an interest was evinced that has increased with the knowledge that the work, study, or manufacture (call it what you will) is very productive, especially in the confines of the girls' broom-factory at Tuskegee Institute. The poultry-yard bought the seeds threshed off the broom-stalks; the hundreds of old handles collected cost nothing, and when the wiring, stitching, and clipping were finished and the girl saw the first broom turned out, there was triumph in the fact that the industry was the most inexpensive and still the most productive of credit of all the girls' industries under the roof of Dorothy Hall. The evolution from the flag-strawbroom used in cabins of the South to the ones now completed and labeled, creates the sensation of the girl-world in the trades school. The wonders brought out in the theory class in connection with broom-making were marvelous. Broom-making has come to remain with our other girls' industries.
Work in the Laundry presents another aspect to the onlooker, and he doubtless decides on the spur of the moment that all is drudgery here. Girls are then assorting countless pieces received on Mondays from students and teachers. They are placing the assorted articles in cages in the basement. Two boys are filling three washers with bed-linen, and in another apartment two girls are weighing and measuring materials to make more soap to add to the boxes standing in the soap-room. Girls up-stairs in the wash-room are busy rubbing at the tubs. Some girls are starching, and others are sending baskets down on the elevator for girls below to hang in the drying-room. Others are in the assorting-room putting away clothes-bags into numerous boxes. The ironing-room farther on is filled with busy workers. Days come during every week when time is spent in the study of laundry chemistry. Rust and mildew stains and scorching are some of the problems of the Laundry, andthey find solution. Soap, starch, water, and bluing have their composite qualities and are analyzed, and no more interesting correlation is there than that of the laundry with the class-room.
Although each Tuskegee girl is expected to become proficient in one trade at least, all are required to attend the cooking classes. Girls belonging to certain classes are scattered in the various divisions, each busily engaged at her chosen trade. At the ringing of the bells in each division at stated hours, classes form and pass to the training-kitchen for their lesson in cooking. Both night-school and day-school girls report every day until every girl has received her lesson weekly. The normal classes have theory and practise one hour each, the preparatory girls one hour weekly for their trades.
This is true also of girls in the normal classes. They spend one hour in basketry study, making in all three hours away from their individual trades each week. Theory is combined with practise, and many a fanciful thought is woven in with the reed and raffia of the Indian baskets, African purses, belts, and pine-needle work-baskets. The shuck hats and foot-mats are so foreign in design that one often wonders how it were possible to utilizethe same material in so widely different purposes. But our girl is progressive, and not a few instances have occurred when one has been informed of the presence of a Tuskegee student in a remote country district, by the inevitable shuck hat prettily designed and worn by an utter stranger. So remunerative has been the work that many have earned money enough from the sales of these hats to purchase books for the school year and pay their entrance fees.
Few girls work at typesetting. Those learning the trade are in the Boys' Trades Building. The same is true of the girl tailors, who are as capable workers in the trade as the boys. The majority of these girls are in night-school, and of late years have not earned much for their work. In former years the greater body of the students were working their way through school, and by their labor would earn enough to complete their education in the Academic Department and the Industrial as well. Last year the pay schedule was reduced, and many appeals for assistance came from those battling their way through. A young girl whose monthly statement warned her that she owed the school $15, at the end of the school year wrote the following:
"Dear Mrs. Washington: I write to inform you of the enormous sum that I owe on my board bill. I am not satisfied, because I want to earn something in life, but it seems that means and opportunity will not permit me. I can't help from crying when I think how anxious and willing my people are to help me to be something, and yet they are unable to help me."My mother has struggled to bring up eight of us, and now is to the point where she can give me no more help, and that leaves me alone to be something by myself. I am anxious to enter day-school so I may finish my course of study and my trade, and at last let my mother see me a good, noble woman, who will take care of her."I will thank you very much for your kindness, if you will look into my board bill and help me as soon, and as much, as possible. Yours gratefully."
"Dear Mrs. Washington: I write to inform you of the enormous sum that I owe on my board bill. I am not satisfied, because I want to earn something in life, but it seems that means and opportunity will not permit me. I can't help from crying when I think how anxious and willing my people are to help me to be something, and yet they are unable to help me.
"My mother has struggled to bring up eight of us, and now is to the point where she can give me no more help, and that leaves me alone to be something by myself. I am anxious to enter day-school so I may finish my course of study and my trade, and at last let my mother see me a good, noble woman, who will take care of her.
"I will thank you very much for your kindness, if you will look into my board bill and help me as soon, and as much, as possible. Yours gratefully."
As the day girls have put in so many hours of work recently under the new system, it eliminates the necessity of so many night-school girls being paid for their work. It is to the interest of the school and its day-students that fewer work their way through school, and the time has come to teach this fact. The boy or girl for a time will stagger in the attempt to gain education, but will be all the more able, later, to reach the desired goal.
All girls are taught housekeeping incidentally in the care of their rooms; but the number assigned to the regular division yearly are instructed in all branches of home industry. The course covering two years is mapped out thoroughly, and when the girls reach the Senior class, all have their turn at housekeeping in the Practise Cottage of four rooms. No girl is graduated from the school without the finishing touch of the little home. Marketing, the planning of meals, table-setting, the care of table- and bed-linen, dusting, sweeping, and everything else pertaining to a well-kept house, are taught by the teacher in domestic science who is in charge of the training-kitchen where the senior girls received their first lessons in cookery. The young housekeepers have reached the stage of efficiency when they may prepare a meal for a distinguished guest.
A red-letter day in the history of the cottage came when a warm-hearted and much-beloved trustee of the institution expressed a wish to dine with the girls during one of his visits to the institution. The flowers that graced the small table on this day were brought by the distinguished visitor, who came from a stroll in the "piney" woods. The girls, apprehensive of their successin preparing the dinner for one with so cultured a palate, felt visibly relieved on the disappearance of the roast, the vegetables, and the dessert. The corn bread was voted the best ever eaten, and the dinner, as a whole, a delicious preparation. If ever, in the years to come, any of the four forgets the kindly heart that made all forget station or condition, "the right hand will forget its cunning."
Days pass all too quickly in work and study. After the supper at six, the girls in the normal classes go to their rooms or the Carnegie Library for study, the girls in the preparatory classes go to the study-hour, and those who have been working at the trades during the day spend two hours in night-school covering half as much ground as those in day-school, and consequently spend a longer period in school. At the ringing of the bell at half past eight all the girls form in line to pass to the Chapel for prayers.
School and work over for the day, every girl seems to lose her personality in her blue braided uniform, with her red tie and turnover on week-day evenings at Chapel, and her white ribbon on Sundays when she passes the platform as she marches by out of the Chapel to her room. Her carriage at least identifies her class-standing, andone may easily note the difference in the manner of her who has newly arrived and another who has been in school with the advantages of several years.
Friday afternoons mark an hour for lectures, girls' clubs, and circle entertainments. Saturday evenings are spent optionally. Time for class gymnastics or sewing or swimming is always spent pleasantly on schedule time during the week. Our girl attends the Christian Endeavor Sunday mornings at nine, Chapel at eleven, Sunday-school at one, and, after dinner is out of the way, spends the enforced quiet hour in her room from three until four o'clock reading. The band concert on the lawn calls all to listen, some walking, some sitting on the seats on the green, but all presenting a picturesque appearance in the blue skirts and white waists of the spring season.
Thus the days and weeks pass, mingled with the sorrows and joys of school-life, its encouragements and disappointments. The months and seasons come and go, and, before one is scarcely aware of the fact, the Commencement Week is here and the hundreds of young people whose lives have come in touch with one another pass on to their homes. Some go out as helpful workers, givinguseful service to others; many will return to complete the course begun, but all, we hope, will give out the light that will not fail. Some are workers with ten talents, some with five, some with one; but all, we trust, will be using them for the upbuilding of the kingdom here on earth.
In his eloquent address in May, 1903, at thememorial services of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Founder, and for twenty-five years Principal, of Hampton Institute, Dr. Booker T. Washington said: "A few nights ago, while I was driving through the woods in Alabama, I discerned in the distance a large, bright fire. Driving to it, I soon found out that by the glow of this fire several busy hands were building a nice frame cottage, to replace a log cabin that had been the abode of the family for a quarter of a century. That fire was lighted by General Armstrong years ago. What does it matter that it was twenty-five years passing through Hampton to Tuskegee and through the Tuskegee Conference to that lonely spot in those lonely woods! It was doing its work very effectually all the same, and will continue to do it through the years to come."
The relations existing between Tuskegee Institute and Hampton Institute are much like those existing between a son and the father who has watched the growth and development of his child through the formative transition periods of his youth, and looks with pride upon him as he stands forth in the full bloom of manhood, enumerating successes already achieved, with large promise of greater and more far-reaching achievements for the immediate future. The child never reaches the point where he does not seek the approval and blessing of the parent, or where he refuses to accept advice and assistance if needed.
In the early days of Tuskegee Mr. Washington turned naturally and properly to Hampton for anything that was needed, as he so beautifully and repeatedly testifies in his autobiography, Up from Slavery. For a long time the men and women who helped him were from Hampton, more than fifty such having been there.
While there is a large number of Hampton graduates in the Industrial Departments of Tuskegee, the teaching force, especially in the Academic Department, represents a dozen or more of the best colleges and universities in this country. The same may be said of Hampton.
Up to about eight or ten years ago we atHampton spoke of Tuskegee as a small Hampton, but "small" no longer describes Tuskegee, and I doubt seriously iflarge Hamptonwould be altogether proper.
While Tuskegee was founded on the Hampton plan, and has consistently followed that plan as far as possible, and while these two great "Industrial Universities" are very much alike in spirit and purpose, they are, on the other hand, very dissimilar in external appearance as well as in internal conduct. Each sends out into the benighted districts of the South, and Hampton also into the Indian country of the West, hundreds of men and women who are living influences of civilization and Christianity in their deepest and most far-reaching sense, adding much to the solution of the perplexing questions with which the nation has to deal.
The conditions surrounding the two schools have necessitated certain differences in their evolution. The personnel of the two institutions is different. Hampton has always been governed and controlled by white people, and its teachers have come from the best families of the North. Tuskegee was founded by a Negro, and its teachers and officers have come from the best types ofthe American Negro and from the best schools opened to them. Hampton deals with a different class of student material, including the Indian, who is almost as different in traits and characteristics from the Negro as he is in feature and origin. These are, in a sense, external differences which must of necessity affect the character and internal machinery of the two institutions.
This is no reflection upon either school, for each is unique and complete in its way, and any marked ethnic change in the management of either would be unfortunate. Hampton is a magnificent illustration of Anglo-Saxon ideas in modern education. Tuskegee, on the other hand, is the best demonstration of Negro achievement along distinctly altruistic lines. In its successful work for the elevation and civilization of the children of the freedmen, it is also the most convincing evidence of the Negroes' ability to work together with mutual regard and mutual helpfulness. When Tuskegee was started there was a serious question as to whether Negroes could in any large measure combine for business or educational purposes. The only cooperative institutions that had been successful among them were the Church and, perhaps, the secret societies.
In material development, in the rapid and steadily improving accession of student material, in enlarging powers for greater usefulness, in influence upon the educational methods of the country and the civilized world, and in the sympathy and respect it has gained for the Negro through the writings and speeches of its Founder and Principal, the Tuskegee Institute has without doubt passed beyond the expectations of those who were most sanguine about its future.
The Tuskegee torch, from the Hampton fire started so many years ago by General Armstrong, has spread and is spreading light to thousands of homes and communities throughout the South, and is the greatest pride and glory of Hampton Institute, and a constant source of inspiration and encouragement to the devoted men and women who have always made Hampton's work possible.
At the conclusion of an address in a Northern city in the interest of Hampton, in which I had quoted Dr. Curry's saying that, "if Hampton had done nothing more than to give us Booker Washington, its history would be immortality," a New England lady of apparently good circumstances and well informed, in the kindness of her heart, took me to task for distorting my facts in sayingthat Tuskegee had grown out of Hampton. She was sure that it was just the other way—that Hampton was an offshoot of Tuskegee. She certainly could not have paid a higher tribute to Hampton, and likewise to Tuskegee.
For the past few years Mr. Washington's deserved popularity and prominence have brought Tuskegee conspicuously and constantly before the public. This has in no sense been a disadvantage to Hampton, but has been a distinct gain in enabling Hampton to point to the foremost man of the Negro race, and to the largest and most interesting and in many ways the best-managed institution of the race, as the best and most conspicuous product of the peculiar kind of education for which Hampton stands.
While Tuskegee is, perhaps, in many respects, better known than Hampton, its antecedent, Hampton, is without doubt much better known and more highly thought of because of the existence of Tuskegee.
Tuskegee in its present state of development would be one of the marvels of the age, even if the personality of its Principal were left out of consideration.
Two thousand Negroes who are scarcely ageneration removed from bondage, being trained, disciplined, controlled by 200 or more of the same racial type; 2,000 Negroes being educated, morally, industrially, intellectually; an industrial university with 100 large buildings well equipped and beautifully laid-off grounds, with a hum and bustle of industry, scientifically and practically conducted by a race considered as representing the lowest ethnic type, upsetting the theories of many well-meaning people who believe the Negroes incapable of maintaining themselves in this civilization, incapable of uniting in any successful endeavor without being under the direct personal control of the dominant Aryan—this is one of the greatest achievements of the race during its years of freedom.
Hampton, though a dozen years older, the pioneer in industrial education, equally well equipped, quite as well conducted, doing as great a work in the elevation of the races it represents, and holding just as important a place in the scheme of modern education, is not so interesting or so wonderful, because its conception and execution are the product of Aryan thought and Aryan ingenuity. New ideas, new discoveries, new inventions and organizations, new methods and new institutions, have been conspicuous among the white race for a thousand years. General Armstrong's wisdom and foresight were truly wonderful, as indeed are also those of his worthy successor, Dr. H. B. Frissell, under whose direction the school's influence and usefulness have steadily increased, and along lines that General Armstrong would approve; but had Hampton been founded and brought to its present state of proficiency by a Negro, and its dominating force been of the African race, it would be a more wonderful and interesting institution. In other words, the white race has long since passed its experimental period. It now is the standard of measurement for all other races. The Negro's achievements, then, are considered largely with reference to the impression which they make upon the race of whose civilization and government he is a part.