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FROM SERVITUDE 
TO SERVICE 



Being the Old South Lectures on the 

History and Work of Southern 

Institutions for the Education 

of the Negro 




BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1905 



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Copyright 1905 
American Unitarian Association 



PRESSWORK BY 

Thb University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction * . v 

By Robert C. Ogden 

I. Howard University 1 

By Professor Kelly Miller 

II. Berea College 4D 

By President William G. Frost 

III. Tuskegee Institute 81 

By Professor Roscoe Conkling Bruce 

IV. Hampton Institute 115 

By Principal H. B. Frissell. 

V. Atlanta University 153 

By Professor W. E. Burghardt Du Bois 

VI. risk University 199 

By President James G. Merrill 



INTRODUCTION 

IN a recent public address the Reverend Bishop 
Charles B. Galloway, of Mississippi, made the 
following statement: "We must insist that the 
Negro have equal opportunity with every American 
citizen to fulfil in himself the highest purpose of 
an all-wise and beneficent Providence.'*' This 
quotation indicates the spirit in which this book 
should be studied. 

The Negro is greatly in evidence, through 
incidents of various sorts having small relation 
to the important questions concerning him that 
should command the earnest thought and intel- 
ligent action of every American. Prevailing in- 
difference to the subject is very apparent and 
painfully abundant. 

When the slavery issue was intense the Negro, 
as the subject of it, was interesting ; but now that 
the dramatic conditions of a great political crisis 
and vast military operations have faded into dis- 
tant perspective, and the sentimental and heroic 
situations are replaced by obligations of simple 
duty to a great mass of plain people ; only the in- 



vi INTRODUCTION 

difference of many, the languid interest of some, 
and the active earnestness of a small righteous 
remnant remain. 

In many localities there appears a settled deter- 
mination to let the Negro take care of himself 
under conditions as they have come to exist. It 
is not exceptional for descendants of abolitionists 
to say, " Our fathers wrought for and secured the 
freedom of the Negro, and now that he is free let 
him work out his own salvation — we have no 
farther duty in the matter. ''^ 

But the question will not down. The Negro 
supplies a stock asset in politics, literature, and 
daily news. The interests of each naturally lead 
to inaccuracy and exaggeration. These expres- 
sions inevitably produce opposing expressions 
equally unreliable. And so, when types and talk 
are abundant and misleading, sanity and intelli- 
gence are much to be desired. 

It is clear to all reasonable minds that the worst 
about the Negro is widely exploited. The coming 
in large numbers of the least desirable Negroes to 
the northern cities presents a forbidding front that 
gives shallow foundation to much unkind opinion. 

The tendency in both North and South to dismiss 
the whole question to the limbo of indifference, or 
worse, by a judgment founded upon partial in- 
formation drawn from the least favorable con- 
ditions, is a misfortune of the entire case. 



INTRODUCTION vii 

A renascence of the national conscience in respect 
of the Negro is needed. It is important that 
questions of personal duty should not be obscured 
and bomb proofs created for cowardly minds by 
abstract discussions of fine distinctions, or of 
questions that are forever settled, concerning 
slavery and the Negro. 

The moral responsibility for slavery, the com- 
parative intellectual capacities of Anglo-Saxon and 
Negro, the alleged mistakes in Negro education, 
the vast political questions of which the emanci- 
pated race is the centre are not without impor- 
tance, but they have nothing to do with questions 
of personal duty and obligation to a struggling 
race of American born people. 

Slavery was a costly legacy for which the nation 
has paid dearly in numerous ways. Our forbears 
could have settled it all justly and cheaply. Our 
question, as an incident of the unwelcome bequest, 
is what will we do with it for our descendants. The 
adjustments that will keep peace and harmony 
between the two races living side by side, when 
the darker race will number twenty and forty 
millions, must be made now. Forty years ago 
American Negroes numbered about four millions, 
but now they count about ten millions. Our 
children will doubtless see the latter number 
doubled, and their children may see it doubled 
again. 



viii INTRODUCTION 

The duty of the hour to the Negro is far plainer 
to the men of to-day than it was to our forbears 
in the slavery years of a century ago. 

One of the writers in this book stated in an 
eloquent public address that the Negro question 
needed for its solution a triple alliance that should 
combine the best intelligence and conscience of 
the South, the North, and the Negro. He is 
right. 

Each element of this threefold combination, 
and all people represented by each, needs to know 
the best about present Negro conditions. Only 
when this comes about can the best be done to 
help the Negro to help himself. The debt due 
by the country to the formerly enslaved race must 
be paid by education and opportunity. The 
obligation of society to the best Afro- Americans 
for service rendered in the public interest needs to 
be understood and appreciated. The vast contri- 
bution to material production, law and order and 
individual happiness made by the teachers of the 
Negro race, despite great limitations, has never 
been recognized at its true value. 

The situation demands truth about Negro educa- 
tional prospects and progress, clearly stated. And 
now comes the valuable symposium of this book 
as a response to that demand. Experienced men 
of both races contribute the several chapters. 
They are not theoretical enthusiasts, but thought- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

ful workers of the second generation in the field 
of Neo-ro education. To the inheritance from 
predecessors they are adding the results of richly 
matured experience. Their facts are reliable, their 
deductions logical. They point the pathway of 
duty leading to the goal of honorable national 
peace between the races. They cheerfully con- 
tribute the self-sacrifice, patience, heroism, intelli- 
gence demanded by the service of leadership. 

Respected in the South, trusted in the North, 
enjoying the confidence of the best Negroes, they 
present the stories of their several institutions. 
The eloquent appeal of these united statements 
commends itself by the very absence of specific 
demand. 

Some of the institutions described herein have 
made great contributions to the general cause of 
education quite aside from special race service. 
The particular interest served by them is national, 
and their work peculiarly their own. 

It is painful that the principals of these great 
schools are compelled to leave their educational 
work, spending on the road the time that should 
be passed in close contact with daily executive 
duty, humbly seeking the money with which to 
sustain their several organizations. A partial off- 
set to this loss appears in the education of the 
North. Their work is not merely in education, 
for it also includes the solution of the greatest 



X INTRODUCTION 

social and economic problem that confronts the 
nation. American pride and Christian civiliza- 
tion are seriously compromised by the demands 
upon the physical, mental, and spiritual strength 
of the men and women who carry vicariously the 
duty of the country to the Negro. 

Robert C. Ogden. 

New York, September, 1905. 



I 

HOWARD UNIVEESITY 

BY 
PROFESSOR KELLY MILLER 



HOWAED UNIVEESITYi 

As the writer of the first chapter of this book 
on Southern Institutions, it devolves upon me, 
perhaps, more than upon those who are to fol- 
low, to lay the basis and background, of which 
each of the institutions treated is but a special 
emergence. They are the outcome of that 
patriotic and humanitarian movement, which 
blotted out the foul stain of slavery from our 
national escutcheon, wrote the last three Amend- 
ments to the Federal Constitution, and made 
that document a charter of liberty, indeed. 

When the smoke of war had blown away, when 
the cessation of strife proclaimed the end of the 
great American conflict, when " the war drum 
throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were 
furled," there emerged from the wreck and ruin 
of war four millions of human chattels, who were 
transformed, as if by magic, in a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye, from slavery to freedom, 
from bondage to liberty, from death unto life. 
These people were absolutely ignorant and desti- 
tute. They had not tasted of the tree of knowl- 
edge which is the tree of good and evil. This 



4 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

tree was guarded by the flaming swords of 
wrath, kept keen and bright by the avarice and 
cupidity of the master class. No enHghtened 
tongue had explained to them the deep moral 
purpose of the Ten Commandments and the Ser- 
mon on the Mount. They were blind alike as to 
the intellectual and moral principles of life. 
Ignorance, poverty and vice, the trinity of 
human wretchedness, brooded over this degraded 
mass and made it pregnant. The world looked 
on and wondered. What is to be the destiny of 
this people.'^ Happily at this tragic juncture of 
affairs, they were touched with the magic wand 
of education. The formless mass assumed sym- 
metry and shape. Order began to rise out of 
chaos. Contrast that day with this day. Turn 
back forty pages of the leaves of history. Look 
on this picture, and then on that. The words of 
prophecy are fulfilled : " Though ye have lain 
among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings 
of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers 
with yellow gold." Nowhere in the whole sweep 
of history has the transforming effect of intelli- 
gence had a higher test of its power. 

The circumstances amid which this work had 
its inception read like the swift-changing scenes 
of a mighty drama. The armies of the North 
are in sight of victory. Lincoln issues his im- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 5 

mortal emancipation proclamation ; Sherman, 
with consummate military skill, destroys the Con- 
federate base of supplies and marches through 
Georgia triumphant to the sea; Grant is on his 
road to Richmond; the Confederate flag has 
fallen; Lee has surrendered; the whole North 
joins in one concerted chorus: " Mine eyes have 
seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." 
These thrilling episodes will stir our patriotic 
emotions to the latest generations. But in the 
track of the Northern army there followed a 
band of heroes to do battle in a worthier cause. 
Theirs was no carnal warfare. They did not 
battle against flesh and blood, but against the 
powers of darkness intrenched in the ignorance 
of a degraded race. A worthier band has never 
furnished theme or song for sage or bard. 
These noble women — for these noble people 
were mostly of the female sex — left homes, their 
friends, their social ties, and all that they held 
dear, to go to the far South to labor among 
the recently emancipated slaves. Their courage, 
their self-sacrificing devotion, sincerity of pur- 
pose and purity of motive, and their unshaken 
faith in God were their pass keys to the hearts 
of those for whom they came to labor. They 
were sustained by an unbounded enthusiasm and 
zeal amounting almost to fanaticism. No mer- 



6 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

cenary or sordid motive attaches to their fair 
names. 

They gave the highest proof that the nine-- 
teenth century, at least, has aiforded that Chris- 
tianity has not yet degenerated into a dead for- 
mula and barren intellectualism, but that it is a 
living, vital power. Out of the abundance of 
their zeal and enthusiasm they established the 
Negro college and university. Their works do 
follow them. What colored man is there in all 
this land who has not felt the uplifting effect of 
their labors ? Their monument is builded in the 
hopes of a race struggling upward from ignor- 
ance to enlightenment, from corruption into 
purity of life. These are they who sowed the 
seed of intelligence in the soil of ignorance and 
planted the rose of virtue in the garden of dis- 
honor and shame. It is said that gratitude is 
the fairest flower which sheds its perfume in the 
human heart. As long as the human heart beats 
in grateful response to benefits received, these 
men and women shall not want a monument of 
living ebony and of bronze. 

Howard University is the outgrowth of this 
sentiment and is broadbased upon the principles 
of equal rights and knowledge for all, a doctrine 
which must now be stoutly defended against 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 7 

derogatory dogma about inferior races and lesser 
breeds of men. 

The Negro is scarcely ever considered with 
reference to the primary problems of life. 
Those needs of the human race which do not de- 
pend upon temporary conditions and circum- 
stances, are not generally deemed predicable of 
him. The African is not regarded in his own 
rights, and for his own sake, but merely with 
reference to the effect which his presence and 
activity produce upon the dominant Aryan. He 
is merely a co-efficient which is not detachable 
from the quantity whose value it may increase 
or diminish. The black object is always pro- 
jected against a white background, producing 
a grotesque and gloomy silhouette. The whole 
history of the contact of the races deals with 
the Negro as a satellite whose movements are 
secondary to those of the central orb about which 
it revolves. Civilization was not thought possi- 
ble for the sons of Ethiopia. The sable livery 
of the tropics was deemed impervious to enno- 
bling influences. The Negro could only con- 
tribute to the wants and welfare of the higher, 
or, I had rather say, the haughtier race. With 
a self-debasement surpassing the vow of anchor- 
ite, he was expected to bow down to his white 
god and serve him, ascribing unto him " the 



8 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever." 
The whole scheme of the subjugation and op- 
pression of the African by the Aryan is based 
upon the theory that the Negro represents an 
inferior order of creation, and therefore his 
needs are secondary to, and derivable from those 
of his white lord and master. The ordinary at- 
tributes and susceptibilities of the human race 
were denied him. When it was first proposed to 
furnish means for the development of the nobler 
side of the Negro race, those who possessed the 
wisdom of their day and generation entertained 
the proposition either with a sneer or with a 
smile. Ridicule and contempt have character- 
ized the habitual attitude of the American mind 
toward the Negro's higher strivings. The 
African was brought to this country for the pur- 
pose of performing manual and menial labor. 
His bodily powers alone were required to accom- 
plish this industrial mission. No more account 
was taken of his higher susceptibilities than of 
the mental and moral faculties of the lower ani- 
mals. The white man, as has been said, saw in 
the Negro's mind only what was apparent in his 
face — " darkness there and nothing more." 
His usefulness In the world Is still measured by 
physical faculties rather than by qualities of 
mind and soul. Even after the wonderful trans- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 9 

formation of the past thirty years, many claim 
to discern no function which he can fill in so- 
ciety, except to administer to the wants and 
wishes of others by means of bodily toil. The 
merciless proposition of Carlyle — " the Negro 
is useful to God's creation only as servant " — 
still finds wide acceptance. It is so natural to 
base a theory upon a long established practice 
that one no longer wonders at the prevalence of 
this belief. The Negro has sustained servile 
relations to the Caucasian for so long a time, 
that it is easy, as it is agreeable, to Aryan pride, 
to conclude that servitude is his ordained place 
in society. 

As the higher susceptibilities of the Negro 
were not needed their existence was, at one time, 
denied. The eternal inferiority of the race was 
assumed as a part of the cosmic order of things. 
History, literature, science, speculative conjec- 
tures, and even the Holy Scriptures were ran- 
sacked for evidence and argument in support of 
this theory. It was not deemed inconsistent with 
Divine justice and mercy that the curse of servi- 
tude to everlasting generations should be pro- 
nounced upon a race because their assumed 
progenitor utilized as an object lesson in temper- 
ance the indulgent proclivity of an ancient pa- 
triarch. Science was placed under tribute for 



10 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

the support of the ruling dogma. The Negro's 
inferiority was clearly deducible from physical 
peculiarities. In basing the existence of mental, 
moral, and spiritual qualities upon the shape and 
size of the skull, facial outline, and cephalic con- 
figuration, the anti-Negro scientists out-dis- 
tanced the modem psychologists in assuming a 
mechanical equivalent of thought. 

But in spite of scientific demonstration, 
learned disquisitions, prohibitive legislation, and 
Divine intendment, the Negro's nobler nature 
persisted in manifesting itself. The love, sym- 
pathy, and tender fidelity, and vicarious devo- 
tion of the African slave, the high spiritual and 
emotional fervor manifested in the weird wail- 
ings and lamentations of the plantation melo- 
dies, the literary taste of Phylis Wheatly, the 
scientific acumen of Benjamin Banneker, the 
persuasive eloquence of Frederick Douglass, 
were but faint indications of the smothered men- 
tal, moral, and spiritual power. The world has 
now come to recognize that the Negro possesses 
the same faculties, powers, and susceptibilities 
as the rest of mankind, albeit they have been 
stunted and dwarfed by centuries of suppression 
and 111 usage. The Negro, too, is gradually 
awakening to a consciousness of this great truth. 
The common convergance of religious and secu- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 11 

lar thought is toward the universal fatherhood 
of God and the brotherhood of man. This 
universaHty of kinship impHes commonality of 
powers, possibilities, and destiny. 

It is a matter of prime importance for the 
Negro to feel and to convince his fellow men 
that he possesses the inherent qualities and there- 
fore the inherent rights that belong to the hu- 
man race. 

Carlyle, though blinded by narrow prejudice, 
when handling the Negro in the concrete, is 
nevertheless a true philosopher when dealing 
with general principles. The same author who 
regards the Negro as an " amicable blockhead," 
and amenable only to the white man's " benefi- 
cient whip,'' also exclaims : " that one man 
should die ignorant who had the capacity for 
knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to hap- 
pen more than twenty times in the minute." 
When it is granted that the Negro has capacity 
for knowledge and virtue, all of his other prob- 
lems flow as corollaries from the leading propo- 
sition. The basal needs of the human race are 
identical. The fundamental, natural, social, 
and spiritual laws apply alike to all. 

Howard University is dedicated to this propo- 
sition. This Institution is by no means the 
least conspicuous among the higher institutions 



la FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

of learning at the national capital. Located on 
a hill, it overlooks the whole city and from its 
dome the visitor gets a bird's view of Wash- 
ington and its surroundings, not exceeded even 
by that afforded by the top of Washington 
Monument. This institution may be regarded 
as the national university of the colored race, 
and has for its constituency one-eighth of the 
American people. It is the sole surviving off- 
spring of the ill-starred Freedman's Bureau and, 
except the Theological Department, is partly 
cared for and fostered, as at least a step-child, 
by the national government. Howard Univer- 
sity was chartered by Congress in 1867 as an 
institution of " liberal culture '' and has ever 
since stood as the Mecca of ambitious colored 
youth who hunger and thirst after knowledge. 
General O. O. Howard, the Christian philan- 
thropist and soldier, was its first president. 
Although this Christian hero of many bat- 
tles has rendered varied and signal service 
in behalf of his country, his enduring monu- 
ment will be the Negro institution to which 
he gave his most earnest and enthusiastic en- 
deavor, as well as his ancient and illustrious 
name. General Howard was succeeded by Rev. 
W. W. Patton, D.D., LL.D., a man of deep and 
varied knowledge, as well as an author of wide 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 13 

repute. The next president of the University 
was Rev. J. E. Rankin, D.D., LL.D., whose 
hymn " God be with you till we meet again " 
is sung around the world. Dr. Rankin was, 
perhaps, America's most famous sacred poet. 
The present head of the institution, Rev. John 
Gordon, D.D., is a lineal descendent of Jona- 
than Edwards, and belongs to a family which 
has furnished presidents to Yale and Princeton. 
The aim of Howard University is to lift the 
Negro to the level of modern civilization. Civ- 
ilization may be defined as the sum total of those 
influences and agencies that make for knowl- 
edge and virtue. This is the goal, the " ultima 
Thule " of all human strivings. The essential 
factors of civilization are knowledge, industry, 
culture, and virtue. Knowledge comprehends 
the facts of the universe ; industry embodies them 
in concrete form; culture leads to rational enjoy- 
ment ; virtue preserves and makes eternal. The 
African was snatched from the wilds of savagery 
and thrust into the midst of a mighty civiliza- 
tion. He thus escaped the gradual process of 
evolution. Other men have labored and he must 
enter into their labors. Education must accom- 
plish more for a backward people than it does 
for those who are in the forefront of progress. 
It must not only lead to the unfoldment of 



14 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

faculties, but must fit for a life frorti which the 
recipient is separated by many centuries of de- 
velopment. The fact that a backward people are 
surrounded by a civilization which is so far in ad- 
vance of their own is by no means an unmixed 
advantage. In the tempestuous current of mod- 
ern life the contestant must either swim on the 
surface or sink out of sight. He must either 
conform or succumb to the inexorable law of 
progress. The African chieftain who would 
make a pilgrimage from his native principality 
to the city of Washington, might accomplish the 
first part of his journey by the original modes of 
transportation — in the primitive dug-out and 
upon the backs of his slaves — but he would com- 
plete it upon the steamship, the railway, the elec- 
tric car and the automobile. How swift the 
transformation ! and yet how suggestive of cen- 
turies of toil, of struggle, and of mental en- 
deavor ! It required the human race thousands of 
years to bridge the chasm between savagery and 
civilization, but now it must be crossed by a 
school curriculum of a few years' duration. The 
analytic process is always more rapid than the 
synthetic. The embryologists tell us that the 
individual, in developing from conception to ma- 
turity, must pass in rapid succession all the 
stages traversed by the race in its struggle up- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 15 

Tv^ard. We are also informed that social evolu- 
tion must take a somewhat similar course. The 
European child is supposed to absorb the civiliza- 
tion of his race in about twenty-five years of 
formative training. The Negro is required to 
master, " de novo '' the principles of civilization 
in a similar, and, indeed, a shorter time. 

Howard University believes that the first need 
of the Negro is that the choice youth of the 
race should assimilate the principles of culture 
and hand them down to the masses below. This 
is the only gateway by which a new people may 
enter into modem civilization. Herein lies the 
history of culture. The select minds of the 
backward race or nation must first receive new 
culture and adapt it to the peculiar needs of 
their own people. Did not the wise men of 
Greece receive the light from Egypt? The 
Roman youth of ambition completed their edu- 
cation in Athens ; the noblemen of northern Eu- 
rope sent their sons to the Southern peninsulas 
in quest of larger learning ; and up to the pres- 
ent day, American youth repair to the European 
universities for a fuller knowledge of the culture 
of the old world. Japan looms up as the most 
progressive of non- Aryan races. This wonder- 
ful progress is due, in a large measure, to their 
wise plan of procedure. They send their picked 



16 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

youth to the great centers of Western knowl- 
edge; but before this culture is applied to their 
own needs it is first sifted through the sieve of 
their native comprehension. The wisdom of this 
policy has been vindicated at Mukden and Port 
Arthur. 

The graduates of Howard and other institu- 
tions of like aim are forming centers of civiliz- 
ing influence in all parts of the land, and we 
confidently believe that these grains of leaven 
will ultimately leaven the whole lump. 

That mere contact with a race of superior de- 
velopment cannot of itself unfold the best possi- 
bilities of a backward people is a proposition, 
which, I think, no student of social phenomena 
will be inclined to dispute. For four hundred 
years the European has been brought in contact 
with feebler races in all parts of the earth, and, 
in most cases this contact has been as the blight- 
ing finger of death. Nowhere do we find a 
single instance in which a people has been lifted 
to civilization thereby. Outward conformity 
may be enforced by a rigid discipline; but out- 
ward forms and fair practices are of little or no 
avail if the inward appreciation be wanting. 
Civilization is centrifugal, and not a centripetal 
process. It cannot be injected hypodermically. 
Healthy growth cannot be secured by feeding a 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 17 

child when it is not hungry, or by forcing upon 
it a diet which it can neither digest nor assimi- 
late. This truth applies not only to the two 
backward races in our own country, but also to 
our " new caught sullen peoples,'' in the distant 
oriental seas. 

Aside from political ambition and commercial 
exploitation, the chief motive of the European in 
treating with feebler races has been to civilize 
and enlighten them. The conversion of the 
Indian to the Christian faith was the chief mo- 
tive assigned for the early colonization of 
America, and yet the influence of such schools 
as Hampton and Carlisle has, perhaps, done 
more to uplift the red man than all of the con- 
tact with the white race since Columbus first 
planted his Catholic cross in the virgin soil of 
the New World. Indeed, the superficial, the 
frivolous, and the vicious qualities are most eas- 
ily communicable. The substantial qualities of 
mind and soul can only be developed by inde- 
pendent activity. 

Foi: four centuries the Portuguese have been 
touching the life of the east coast of Africa 
with their missionary propagandism, commercial 
enterprise, and governmental policy; but ac- 
cording to the highest testimony they have 
made no abiding impression upon the life of that 



18 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

continent than one might make upon the surface 
of the ocean with the dent of his finger. 

The Negro has now reached a critical stage 
in his career. The point of attachment between 
the races which slavery made possible has been 
destroyed. The relation is daily becoming less 
intimate and friendly and more formal and busi- 
ness-like. It thus becomes all the more impera- 
tive that the race should gain for itself the pri- 
mary principles of knowledge and culture. 

Howard University is primarily an institution 
of liberal culture. It has Preparatory, Normal, 
Collegiate, Theological, Law and Medical De- 
partments, the variety and extent of whose curri- 
cula are quite abreast with the approved stand- 
ards in similar institutions for the white race. 
There are chemical, physical, biological, dental, 
and pharmaceutical laboratories, and its general 
conveniences and facilities of instruction are up 
to the requirements of the educational world. 
Howard students frequently change to New 
England colleges and professional schools with- 
out loss of class standing. There are about one 
thousand students in the University, making the 
largest body of colored pupils to be found any 
where in the world, pursuing higher academic 
and professional studies. They come from the 
higher departments of public schools, and from 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 19 

various private Institutions, whose graduates 
come to Howard to receive the finishing touches. 
There is to be found in every community a lad 
of exceptional endowment, who, to his simple 
rustic neighbors, passes as a marvel of learning. 
These rural prodigies somehow find their way 
to Howard University, where they receive a poise 
and balance by being pitted against like celebri- 
ties from otlier communities. If any are still 
skeptical as to the intellectual capacity of the 
Negro, they would have their doubts speedily 
dispelled by a visit to Howard University where 
they might observe the Negro youth a few years 
removed from the cotton field and the cane brake, 
handling the intricate problems of Greek syntax 
and analytical geometry with the aptness and 
facility of the most favored white collegian. 
Students frequently come from the Northern and 
Western states where there is no racial bar 
against their entering local institutions. There 
seems to be a certain consciousness of kind, If 
not of color, even In the pursuit of knowledge. 
Frequently young men take their Degree of 
Bachelor of Arts at Northern colleges and pur- 
sue their course In law or medicine at Howard 
University. Students who come to Howard Uni- 
versity are for the most part very poor, and are 
dependent upon their own effort for support. 



20 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

The most strenuous incidents in the biography 
of Booker T. Washington could be multiplied 
a hundred times in the experience of Howard 
students. One of the most distinguished grad- 
uates the University has ever turned out walked 
all the way from Alabama to Washington in 
order to enter school. The late Henry George 
might have found among these pupils numerous 
striking illustrations of " Progress and Pov- 
erty." 

Howard University promotes the higher aims 
and aspirations of the Negro race by employing 
colored men on the teaching force and govern- 
ing board. All of the faculties are composed of 
white and colored instructors in about equal 
numbers. Colored men teach higher mathe- 
matics, classics, metaphysics, and the various 
topics of law, theology and medicine. These 
instructors are competent and thorough in the 
work as tested by the best approved teaching 
requirements and methods. Several of the col- 
ored professors are members of learned societies 
and are acceptable contributors to current 
thought and discussion along the lines of their 
special work. 

Self-reliance is the first requisite of American 
citizenship which the school must in a large meas- 
ure supply. Slavery made the Negro as de- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 21 

pendent upon the intelligence and foresight of 
his master as a soldier upon the will of his com- 
mander. He had no need to take thought as 
to what he should eat or drink or wherewithal 
he should be clothed. 

Knowledge necessarily awakens self-con- 
sciousness of power. When a child learns the 
multiplication table he gets a clear notion of 
intellectual dignity. Here he gains an acqui- 
sition which is his permanent, personal posses- 
sion, and which can never be taken from him. 
It does not depend upon external authority; he 
could reproduce it if all the visible forms of 
the universe were effaced. It is said that the 
possession of personal property is the greatest 
stimulus to self-respect. When one can read 
his title clear to earthly possessions, it awakens 
a consciousness of the dignity of his own man- 
hood. And so when one has digested and as- 
similated the principles of knowledge he can 
file his declaration of intellectual independence. 
He can adopt the language of Montaigne: 
" Truth and reason are common to everyone, 
and are no more his who speaks them first than 
his who speaks them after; 'tis no more accord- 
ing to Plato than according to me, since he and 
I equally see and understand them." 

Primary principles have no ethnic quality. 



22 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

We hear much in this day and time of the white 
man's civilization. We had just as well speak 
of the white man's multiplication table. Civili- 
zation is the common possession of all who assimi- 
late and apply its principles. England can 
utilize no secret art or invention that is not 
equally available to Japan. We reward inge- 
nuity with a patent right for a period of years 
upon the process that has been invented; but 
when an idea has been published to the world 
it is no more the exclusive property of the author 
than gold after it has been put into circulation, 
can be claimed by the miner who first dug it from 
its hiding place in the earth. No race or nation 
can pre-empt civilization any more than they 
can monopolize the atmosphere which surrounds 
the earth, or the waters which hold it in their 
liquid embrace. 

I have often noticed a young man accommo- 
date his companion with a light from his cigar. 
After the spark has once been communicated, 
the beneficiary stands on equal footing with the 
benefactor. In both cases the fire must be con- 
tinued by drawing fresh supplies of oxygen 
from the atmosphere. From whatever source a 
nation may derive the light of civilization, It 
must be perpetuated by their own faculties. 
Self-reliant manhood is the ultimate basis of 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 23 

American citizenship. Training in patriotic 
principles and American ideals is a part of the 
work of Howard University. 

The work of the educated colored man is 
largely that of leadership. He requires, there- 
fore, all the discipline, judgment and mental 
equipment that long preparation can afford. 
The more ignorant and backward the masses the 
more skilled and sagacious the leaders should be. 
If a beneficial and kindly contact between the 
races is denied on the lower plane of flesh and 
blood, it must be sought in the upper region 
of mental and moral kinship. Knowledge and 
virtue know no ethnic exclusiveness. If indeed 
races are irreconcilable, their best individual ex- 
ponents are not. All dignified negotiation must 
be conducted on the high plane of individual 
equality. 

'' For east is east, and west is west, and never the 

twain shall meet, 
'Till earth and sky stand presently at God's 

great judgment seat; 
But there is neither east nor west, border nor 

breed nor birth. 
When two strong men stand face to face, though 

they come from the ends of the earth." 



24 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

The irreconcilable becomes reconciled only 
after each has manifested the best possibilities 
of a common nature. The higher education 
tends to develop superior individuals who may 
be expected to exercise a controlling influence 
over the multitude. The individaul is the proof, 
the promise and the salvation of the race. The 
undeveloped races, which in modern times have 
faded before the breath of civilization, have pro- 
bably perished because of their failure to 
produce commanding leaders to guide them 
wisely under the stress and strain which an en- 
croaching civilization imposed. A single red 
Indian with the capacity and spirit of Booker 
T. Washington might have solved the red man's 
problems and averted his impending doom. 

Again, the higher education should be encour- 
aged because of the moral impotency of all the 
modes of education which do not touch and stir 
the human spirit. It is folly to suppose that 
the moral nature of the child is improved be- 
cause it has been taught to read and write and 
cast up accounts, or to practice a handicraft. 
Tracing the letters of the alphabet has no bear- 
ing upon the Golden Rule. The spelling of 
words by sound and syllable does not lead to 
the observance of the Ten Commandments. 
Drill in the multiplication table does not fasci- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 25 

nate the learner with the Sermon on the Mount. 
Rules in grammar, dates in history, sums in 
arithmetic, and points in geography do not 
strengthen the grasp on moral truth. The abil- 
ity to saw to a line or hit a nail aplomb with a 
hammer does not create a zeal for righteousness 
and truth. It is only when the pupil comes to 
feel the vitalizing power of knowledge that it 
begins to re-act upon the life and to fructify in 
character. This is especially true of a back- 
ward race whose acquisitive power out runs its 
apperceptive faculty. 

The social separation of the races in America 
renders it imperative that the professional 
classes among the Negroes should be recruited 
from their own ranks. Under ordinary circum- 
stances, professional places are filled by the most 
favored classes in the community. In a Latin 
or Catholic country, where the fiction of " so- 
cial equality '* does not exist, there is felt no 
necessity for Negro priest, teacher or physician 
to administer to his own race. But in America 
this is conceded to be a social necessity. Such 
being the case, the Negro leader, to use the 
familiar term, requires all the equipment of his 
white confrere, and special knowledge of the 
needs and circumstances of his race in addition. 
The teacher of the Negro child, the preacher 



26 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

of a Negro congregation, or the physician to 
Negro patients, certainly requires as much pro- 
fessional skill as do those who administer to the 
corresponding needs of the white race. Nor is 
the requirement of the situation one whit dimin- 
ished because the bestower is of the same race 
as the recipient. The Negro has the same pro- 
fessional needs as his white confrere and can be 
qualified for his function only by courses of 
training of like extent and thoroughness. By 
no other means can he be qualified to enlighten 
the ignorant, restrain the vicious, care for the 
sick and afflicted, plead in litigation the cause of 
the injured, or administer solace to weary souls. 
This is the work to which Howard University 
is devoted. 

According to the census of 1900, there were 
72 cities in the United States with a population 
of more than 5,000 persons of color, averaging 
15,000 each, and aggregating 1,000,000 in all. 
The professional needs of this urban population 
for teachers, preachers, lawyers and physicians 
call for 5,000 well-equipped men and women, 
not one of whom would be qualified for his func- 
tion by xhe three R's or a handicraft. 

The supreme concern of philanthropy is the 
welfare of the unawakened rural masses. To 
this end there is need of a goodly sprinkling 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 27 

of well educated men and women to give wise 
guidance, direction and control. Let no one 
deceive himself that the country Negro can be 
uplifted except through the influence of a higher 
contact. It is impossible to inaugurate and con- 
duct a manual training school or an industrial 
school without men of sound academic, as well 
as technical knowledge. The torch which is to 
lighten the darksome places of the South must 
be kindled at the centers of light. 

Rational enjoyment, through moderation, is 
perhaps as good a definition as can be given of 
culture. The reaction of culture upon conduct 
is a well known principle of practical ethics. 
The Negro race is characterized by boisterous- 
ness of manner and extravagant forms of taste. 
As if to correct such deficiencies, his higher edu- 
cation, hitherto, has largely been concerned with 
Greek and Latin literature, the norms of modern 
culture. It is just here that our educational 
critics are likely to become excited. The spec- 
tacle of a Negro wearing eye-glasses and de- 
claiming in classic phrases about the " lofty walls 
of Rome," and the " wrath of Achilles " upsets 
their critical calmness and composure. We have 
so often listened to the grotesque incongruity of 
a Greek chorus and a greasy cabin, and the rela- 
tive value of a rosewood piano and a patch of 



28 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

early rose potatoes, that if we did not join in 
the smile to encourage the humor, we should do 
so out of sheer weariness. And yet we cannot 
escape the conviction that one of the Negro's 
chief needs is a higher form of intellectual and 
esthetic taste. 

Whenever the higher education of the Negro 
is broached, industrial training is always sug- 
gested as a counter irritant. Partisans of rival 
claims align themselves in hostile array and will 
not so much as respect a flag of truce. These 
one-eyed enthusiasts lack binocular vision. The 
futile discussion as to whether industrial or 
higher education is of greater importance to the 
Negro is suggestive of a subject of great re- 
nown in rural debating societies : " Which is 
of greater importance to man, air or water? " 
We had as well attempt to decide whether the 
base or the altitude is the more important ele- 
ment of a triangle. The two forms of training 
should be considered on the basis of their rela- 
tive, not rival, claims. This ardent discussion 
is both mischievous and silly. The question is 
merely one of ration and proportion and can 
never be made a matter of fundamental contro- 
versy. There is need of one Howard to ten 
Hamptons. Howard can take no part in the 
prevailing controversy as to the modes of train- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 29 

ing, for it believes in all modes of education in 
their proper place and proportion. The institu- 
tion endeavors to affiliate the various departments 
into which its work is divided and to keep them 
all in harmony with its leading aim, namely, to 
raise men's bodies by raising their souls. All 
sensible men must not only approve but applaud 
the work of the industrial schools. But if all 
were hands where were the head? After mak- 
ing provision for the few people of any race 
who are capable to direct, there will be left suffi- 
cient to toil. The value of the triangle depends 
upon its altitude as well as upon its base. The 
Negro race comprises some nine million souls, 
with varied capacities, aptitudes, opportunities 
and responsibilities, and it is plainly evident 
that no single program is adequate to such a 
wide circle of needs. 

In competing for public favor institutions de- 
voted to higher reaches of knowledge are always 
placed at a disadvantage as compared with those 
that are on a more concrete and material basis. 
They have little to display that appeals to the 
eye or captivates the fancy. The nature of 
their work does not so readily lend itself to 
graphic description or pictorial illustration. 
Intellectual development cannot be shown by a 
photograph, like the productions of the manual 



so FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

arts. Because of the comparative lack of pic- 
turesqueness and display, the higher institutions 
of learning, devoted to the Negro race, are apt 
to be regarded as too theoretical, without tangi- 
ble methods and results. There has recently- 
sprung into prominence a class of educational 
philosophers who seem to maintain that only such 
information as will be honored at the corner 
grocery, or is convertible, at sight, into cash 
equivalent, is of practical value. But there is 
a deeper philosophy. All knowledge which 
clarifies the vision, refines the feelings, broadens 
the conceptions of truth and duty, and ennobles 
the manhood, is of the highest and most valuable 
form of practicability. An institution which 
sends into the world a physician to heal the sick, 
a lawyer to plead the cause of the injured, a 
teacher to enlighten the mind of the ignorant, 
a leader to give wise direction to the simple, 
or a preacher to administer spiritual solace to 
hungry souls, is rendering just as practicable a 
service as those schools which prepare men to 
engage in the agricultural or mechanical arts. 

Indeed, one of the strongest claims for the 
higher education of the Negro is that it will 
stimulate dormant industrial capacities of the 
race. The surest way to incite a people to meet 
the material demands of life is to teach them 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 31 

that life is more than meat. The unimagina- 
tive laborer pursues the dull routine of his daily 
task, spurred only by the immediate demands of 
life and the task-master's stern command. To 
him it is only time and the hour that run through 
the whole day. The Negro lacks enlightened 
imagination. He needs prospect and vista. 
He does not make provision because he lacks 
prevision. Under slavery he toiled as an ass, 
dependent upon the daily allowance from his 
master's crib. To him the prayer " Give us this 
day our daily bread " had a material rather than 
a spiritual meaning. If you would perpetuate 
the industrial incapacity of the Negro, then con- 
fine him to the low grounds of drudgery and 
toil and prevent him from casting his eyes unto 
the hills whence come inspiration and promise. 
The man with the hoe is of all men the most 
miserable unless, forsooth, he has hope. But 
if imbued with hope and sustained by an ideal, 
he can consecrate the hoe as well as any other 
instrument of service, as a means of fulfilling 
the promise within him. When a seed is sown 
in the ground it first sends its roots into the soil 
before its blades can rise out of it. But is it 
not actuated by the plant consciousness to seek 
the light of heaven? For what is the purpose 
for sending its roots below, if it be not in order 



32 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

to bear fruit above? The pilgrim fathers in 
following the inspiration of a lofty ideal de- 
veloped the resources of a continent. Any peo- 
ple who attempt to reach the sky on a pedestal 
of bricks and mortar will end in confusion and 
bewilderment as did the builders of the Tower 
of Babel on the plains of Shinar, in the days 
of Eld. It requires range of vision to stimulate 
the industrial activities of a people. The most 
effective prayer that can be uttered for the 
Negro is " Lord, open thou his eyes.'' He can- 
not see beyond the momentary gratification of 
appetite and passion. He does not look before 
and after. Such stimulating influence can be 
brought to bear upon the race only through the 
inspiration of higher culture. 

It requires men of sound knowledge to con- 
ceive and execute plans for the industrial edu- 
cation of the masses. The great apostles of in- 
dustrial education for the Negro have been of 
academic training or its cultural equivalent. 
The work of Hampton and Tuskegee is carried 
on by men and women of a high degree of men- 
tal cultivation. 

Doctor Booker T. Washington (note the title) 
is the most influential Negro that the race under 
freedom has produced. He is the great apostle 
of industrial training. His great success is but 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 33 

the legitimate outcome of his earnestness and 
enthusiasm. And yet there is no more striking 
illustration of the necessity of wise, judicious 
and cultivated leadership as a means of stimu- 
lating the dormant activity of the masses than 
he who hails from Tuskegee. His success is 
due wholly to his intellectual and moral faculties. 
His personal opportunities of association and 
contact have been equivalent to a liberal educa- 
tion. Two of America's greatest institutions 
of learning have fittingly recognized his moral 
and intellectual worth by decorating him with 
their highest literary honors. Mr. Washington 
possesses an enlightened mind to discover the 
needs of the masses, executive tact to put his 
plans into effective operation, and persuasive 
ability to convince others as to the expediency of 
his policies. He possesses no trade or handicraft. 
If so he has never let the American people into 
the secret. Nor can it be easily seen what bene- 
fit such trade or handicraft would give him in 
the work which has fallen to his lot. Tuskegee 
was built on intellect and oratory. If Mr. 
Washington had been born with palsied hands, 
but endowed with the intellectual gifts and pow- 
ers of persuasive speech, Tuskegee would not 
have suffered one iota by reason of his manual 
affliction. But on the other hand, had he come 



34, FROM S1:RVITUDE TO SERVICE 

into the world with a sluf^gish brain and a heavy 
tongue, whatever cunning and skill his hand may 
liave acquired, he never could have developed the 
inslitulion which has made him justly famous 
throughout the civiHzed world. 

Slavery taught the Negro to work, but at the 
same time to despise those who worked. To 
them all show of respectability was attached to 
those whom circumstances placed above the ne- 
cessity of toil. It requires intellectual concep- 
tion of the object and the end of labor to over- 
come this mischievous notion. The Negro 
mechanics produced inider the old slave regime 
arc rapidly passing away because they did not 
possess the power of self-per])etuation. They 
were not rooted and grounded in rational prin- 
ciples of the mechanical arts. The hand could 
not transmit its cunning because the mind was 
not trained. They were given the knack with- 
out the knowledge. 

It is often charged that the higher education 
lifts the Negro above the needs of his race. The 
thousands of graduates of Negro Schools and 
Colleges all over the land are a living refuta- 
tion of this charge. After the mind has been 
stored with knowledge it is transmitted to the 
])lace where the need is greatest and tlie call 
loudest, and transnuited into whatever mode of 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 35 

energy may be necessary to accomplish the im- 
posed task. 

The issues involved in the race question are 
as intricate in their relations and as far reach- 
ing in their consequences as any that have ever 
taxed human wisdom for solution. No one can 
be too learned or too profound in whose hands 
are entrusted the temporal and eternal destiny 
of a human soul. Even if the educated Negro 
desired to flee from his race, he soon learns by 
bitter experience that he will be thrown back 
upon himself by tho expulsive power of preju- 
dice. He soon learns that the Newtonian 
formula has a social application : " The force 
of attraction varies directly as the mass." 

Howard University is a standing refutation 
of this charge; It has touched the life of, per- 
haps a majority, the most eminent colored men 
in America. She reckons among her alumni 
many of the leading Afro- Americans in all lines 
of endeavor. Douglass, Langston, and Bruce 
were members of its governing board. Hon. 
Judson W. Lyons, Register of the United States 
Treasury, whose signature is necessary to validi- 
tate our national currency, is an alumnus of 
Howard, as is also Hon. Geo. H. White, the 
last Negro member of Congress, whose pathetic 
benediction on leaving that body made such a 



36 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

deep impression upon the country. Mr. T. 
Thomas Fortune, the redoubtable editor o£ the 
New York Age^ is also a Howard product. 
Prof. Hugh M. Brown is principal of the Insti- 
tute for colored youth in Philadelphia, whose 
leading purpose is to prepare teachers indus- 
trially for work in the South. Mr. Brown 
taught for a number of years at Hampton In- 
stitute, and his advocacy of manual training 
as a means of race development is scarcely less 
emphatic than that of Booker T. Washington 
himself. Prof. William H. H. Hart, who 
walked from Alabama to Washington, is founder 
and principal of the Hart Farm School which 
takes neglected waifs from the slums and alleys 
of the city and transforms them into useful and 
enthusiastic agricultural workers. Mr. Hart's 
school is located near Fort Washington, Mary- 
land, and is looked upon by students of social 
subjects as a most significant movement for the 
welfare of the colored race. Hon. John H. 
Smyth, ex-minister to Liberia, is founder and 
manager of the Juvenile Reformatory of Vir- 
ginia. The institution has two thousand acres 
of land, where juvenile offenders are sent by. the 
state of Virginia, so as to separate them from 
the hardened criminal adults in the state prison, 
and also to reform their evil tendencies and de- 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 37 

velop in them intelligent industrial habits. Mr. 
Smyth has about one hundred wards, and his 
success has received the highest commendation 
of the state authorities. 

Mr. William E. Benson is the promoter of an 
industrial settlement at Kowaliga, Alabama. 
He has secured seven thousand acres of land and 
is developing a thriving Negro community on 
the basis of industrial thrift and co-operation. 
Ex-Congressman Geo. H. White, has secured two 
thousand acres of land near Cape May, New 
Jersey, and has established a town which bears 
his own name, as a sort of refuge for thrifty 
Negroes who are dissatisfied with conditions in 
the South. Prof. James M. Gregory is prin- 
cipal of the state Industrial School of New 
Jersey, for the education of colored youth. 
These are but a sample of the alumni of Howard 
who are devoting their energies to the social and 
industrial betterment of the masses. 

Colored youth in increasing numbers are en- 
tering Northern Universities, and are gaining 
distinction both in the intellectual and the ath- 
letic arena. Some go so far as to deprecate the 
existence of distinct higher institutions for the 
Negro, claiming that the few capable colored 
men can find accommodation in the larger white 
schools. It is by no means certain just how 



38 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

many Negroes would be received by a Northern 
College before the strenuous protest would arise 
that the black element is becoming " too numer- 
ous." The Northern College is not apt to in- 
spire the Negro with enthusiasm and zeal for the 
work which Providence has assigned him. 
Neither is the Negro student likely to develop 
initiative and self-reliance. He is rather prone 
to regard himself as a recipient, rather than a 
partaker, rather a looker-on than a promoter. 
Harvard has not yet produced a Booker T. 
Washington, although it has adopted him and 
honors his name above every other name among 
colored men. It is true that the Negro needs the 
benefit of contact and comparison and the zeal 
for truth and knowledge that the Northern In- 
stitutions impart. The Northern College gives 
the Negro his diploma and its benediction on the 
same day. Were it not for the colored school 
there would be little scope for the exploitation of 
acquired knowledge. On the other hand, How- 
ard University furnishes stimulus and encour- 
agement to Negro youth all over the land, 
affording colored men opportunity to occupy 
places of honor and distinction, and thus to gain 
reputation and standing in the educational 
world. A people is inspired by the exaltation 
of individuals of its own blood. 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 39 

The Medical Department of the University 
has had the largest and most conspicuous suc- 
cess. Perhaps one-third of all the colored doc- 
tors in the country are graduates of this insti- 
tution. As an illustration of the wide-spread 
influence of this department, in the city of 
Charleston, S. C, there are eight colored physi- 
cians, every one of whom is an alumnus of How- 
ard. Among these may be numbered Dr. W. D. 
Crum, upon whom national attention has been 
focussed on account of the persistency wdth 
which President Roosevelt has sent his name to 
the Senate as collector of customs for the Port 
of Charleston. The city of Charleston has a 
Negro population of 30,000 and the death rate 
among them is something awful to contemplate. 
The Negrt> Physician is really a missionary of 
good health. He is rendering a patriotic service 
by checking the threatening physical decline of 
the race, and thus adding to the effective eco- 
nomic and industrial strength of the nation. 
The Negro physician Is shown every professional 
courtesy by his white confrere, with whom he 
freely and frequently consults. The Freed- 
men's Hospital at Washington, where colored 
surgeons perform operations which tax the high- 
est surgical skill, and which attract wide atten- 
tion throughout the profession, is under the 



40 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

direction of Dr. W. A. Warfield, a graduate of 
Howard. Although the Freedmen's Hospital 
containing some 300 beds, is wholly supported 
by the national government, yet it is so closely 
affiliated with Howard University as to be prac- 
tically a part of it. The Medical faculty and 
students are thus afforded exceptional hospital 
facilities. The last session of Congress appro- 
priated $300,000 for a modern, up-to-date hos- 
pital building whose professional management 
is lodged in the medical faculty of the Univer- 
sity. It is interesting to know that the bill 
carrying this provision was introduced in the 
Senate by Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, of 
South Carolina. The facilities of the Freed- 
men's Hospital and of the Medical College are 
utilized as a training school for colored nurses. 
The services of these nurses are in great request 
by the best white families. The ignorant, un- 
couth Negro woman by sheer force of natural 
affection was able to take the children of her 
refined and cultivated mistress and beget for her- 
self an attachment and a fondness beyond that 
they bore for their own parents. This natural 
affection is not destroyed by cultivation but re- 
appears in a more refined form. The colored 
nurse Is noted for the tenderness, sympathy and 
sacrificial attention which she bestows upon the 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 41 

sufferers committed to her care. This relation 
is of wide importance at the time of almost sud- 
den sundering of the ties of attachment and en- 
dearment which once held the races together. 

The function of the Negro lawyer is generally 
under-estimated. He is usually regarded as a 
charlatan or a pettifogger, with little comprehen- 
sion or serious purpose concerning the weighty 
matters of the law. Any set of men whose clien- 
tele falls mainly among the criminal classes is 
apt to acquire an unsavory reputation. The 
highest function of the colored lawyer is to teach 
the race the sacredness of an obligation, to incul- 
cate a sense of civic duty. The lawyer is the 
natural leader of the people in general move- 
ments, and directs their energies along lines of 
public and civic endeavor. He renders a patri- 
otic service by interpreting the beneficent pur- 
pose and intendment of legally constituted order, 
which lies at the basis of all orderly society. 

Howard University has furnished the colored 
race with about half of its lawyers. Careful 
investigation shows that they are generally suc- 
cessful, and useful men in their several commu- 
nities. Seventy replies to ninety-three letters of 
inquiry, show that their income ranges from 
$600.00 to $5,000.00 per year, with an average 
of $1,850.00. These men all report that they 



43 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

meet with uniform courtesy by their white fel- 
low jurist consults. There is no case on record 
where a white lawyer has refused a retainer be- 
cause a colored man was his adversary at the bar. 
Perhaps the most conspicuous success among 
Howard's alumni is D. Augustus Straker, of 
Detroit, Michigan, who was twice elected to a 
judicial position by white votes of that city, and 
who is also the author of several law books of 
recognized merit. Mr. Straker is regarded as 
one of the strong lawyers of the Detroit Bar. 

The Theological Department of Howard Uni- 
versity is unique among theological seminaries. 
It is of an undenominational character ; faculty 
and students represent the various modes of be- 
lief and forms of worship that prevail in the 
Protestant Church. The Theological gradu- 
ates are among the most influential members of 
the different denominations represented by Ne- 
gro churches, and some of them are engaged in 
missionary work both at home and in the foreign 
fields. 

The charge has recently been made that money 
spent on the higher education of th€ Negro has 
been wasted. Does this charge come from the 
South? When we consider that it was through 
Northern Philanthropy that a third of its popu- 
lation received their first impulse toward better 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 43 

things; that these higher institutions prepared 
the 30,000 Negro teachers whose services are 
utihzed in the pubHc schools; that the men and 
women who were the beneficiaries of this philan- 
thropy are doing all in their power to control, 
guide, and restrain the South^s ignorant and 
vicious masses, thus lightening the public burden 
and lifting the general life to a higher level; 
that these persons are almost without exception 
earnest advocates of peace, harmony and good 
w^U between the races ; to say nothing of the fact 
that these vast philanthropic contributions have 
passed through the trade channels of Southern 
merchants, it would seem that the charge is 
strangely incompatible with that high-minded 
disposition and chivalrous spirit which the South 
is so zealous to maintain. Does this charge come 
from the North? It might not be impertinent 
to propound a few propositions for their con- 
sideration. Is it possible to specify a like sum 
of money spent upon any other backward race 
that has produced greater results than that spent 
upon the Southern Negro? Is it the American 
Indian, upon whom four centuries of missionary 
effort has produced no more progress than Is 
made by a painted ship on a painted sea? Is It 
the Hawaiian, who will soon be civilized off the 
face of the earth? Is it the Chinese upon whom 



M FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

the chief effect of Christian philanthropy is to 
incite them to breathe out slaughter against the 
stranger within their gates? It is incumbent 
upon him who claims that this money has been 
wasted to point out where, in all the range of 
benevolent activity the contributions of philan- 
thropy have been more profitably spent. 

It is true that forty or fifty millions of dollars 
have been thus spent, but when we consider the 
magnitude of the task to which it was applied, 
we find that it would not average one dollar a 
year for each Negro child to be educated. Why 
should we marvel, then, that the entire mass of 
ignorance and corruption has not put on en- 
lightenment and purity ? 

But wisdom is justified of her children. The 
complainant is always craftily careful to avoid 
a bill of particulars. He does not specify any 
particular institution of which the charge is true, 
but contents himself with damaging generalities. 
Howard University has cost between two and 
three millions of dollars for foundation and 
maintenance during the past thirty-eight years. 
As returns on this Investment, it has sent into the 
world, in round numbers, 200 ministers of the 
gospel; 900 physicians, pharmacists and den- 
tists; 400 lawyers; 400 teachers; 100 trained 
nurses; and 500 men and women with general 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 45 

collegiate and academic training, together with 
thousands of some-time pupils who have shared 
the partial benefit of its courses. These twenty- 
five hundred graduates and ten thousand some- 
time pupils are to be found in every state and 
territory, in every town and county where the 
Negro population resides. They occupy the 
highest positions of usefulness and honor al- 
lotted colored men, as well as fill the humbler 
spheres of sacrificial service. These men and 
women are advocates of peace and harmony be- 
tween the races, and are preaching, teaching, 
practicing, hoping, praying, pleading for the 
upbuilding of the Negro race. Where can it 
be shown that a like sum of money has been ex- 
pended so as to produce a more wholesome or 
wide-spread influence upon the social betterment 
of the people? 

While the Negro constitutes the main body of 
students of Howard University, yet the Institu- 
tion is broadbased upon the principles of hu- 
manity, and makes no distinction on account of 
race, sex, or religion. Many white students 
recognize and avail themselves of the excellence 
of its courses. Among the student body may be 
found representatives of Japan, Corea, Bulgaria, 
Burmah, Cuba, Africa, Porto Rica, and the 
British West Indian Isles. As our country ex- 



46 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

tends its influence over the weaker peoples of the 
earth, there will be felt more and more the ne- 
cssity of some institution where they can be 
trained in the principles and practice of West- 
ern civilization and American citizenship. 

Howard University, located at the national 
capital, with facilities equal to the best educa- 
tional demands, affording opportunity for close 
observation of the machinery of the government, 
and with a student body in natural sympathy 
with the " lesser breeds," seems destined to be- 
come, in a broader and wider sense, the national 
university of the colored race. 

From this unique center of advantage and 
opportunity, her lines go out to the remotest 
ramifications of our national domain. From 
this wide area she draws in the picked youth of 
an awakening race and sends them forth 
equipped with requisite knowledge and imbued 
with a sense of service. She holds a peculiarly 
important place in the educational scheme of the 
Negro race and in its general social development. 
Her widespread influence goes out and reaches 
down and lifts up. A university, adequately 
equipped, capably administered, whose courses 
and methods are in harmony with the best ap- 
proved standards, and whose tradition and ideals 
evoke the highest enthusiasm and aspiration of 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 47 

its constituents, typifies and expresses the chief 
hope in the progress of any people. This is the 
aim of Howard University; and to this end she 
appeals for sympathy, encouragement and sup- 
port to all who believe that in the scheme of 
human development the mind must quicken and 
stimulate the masses. 



II 

BEREA COLLEGE 

BY 
PRESIDENT WILLIAM G. FEOST 



BEREA COLLEGE 

Among the educational institutions of the 
South Berea College claims three distinctions, 
each of which touches national concerns. 

In the first place, it was founded by anti- 
slavery Southerners before the civil war. It is 
perhaps the most conspicuous and the last ex- 
ample of that Southern spirit which survived 
from Revolutionary days and uttered its unawed 
protest down to the very time of the Rebellion. 

In the second place, it discovered the American 
Highlanders. Berea's founders and teachers first 
observed that the mountain region of the South 
formed one of the grand divisions of our coun- 
try. They first noted the sociological distinc- 
tion of the people inhabiting the rugged coun- 
try where the backyards of eight states come 
together, and they led the way in devising edu- 
cational adaptations which should make the 
mountain region a better place to be born in — 
make it something like what Scotland is in Great 
Britain, a storehouse of national vigor and pa- 
triotism. 

And in the third place, Berea has proved the 
51 



52 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

practicability of the ideal. On the old soil of 
slavery it freely admitted white and colored stu- 
dents and taught them in the same classes, with- 
out contamination or reproach. The story of 
such an enterprise is crowded with interest alike 
for the teacher, the philanthropist, and the pa- 
triot. 

The story of the spirit of liberty in America 
shows us a gradual decline throughout the 
Southern states after the Revolution, a decline 
accelerated by the invention of the cotton gin, 
so that, in the quaint words of Horace Greeley, 
'^ as slavery grew more profitable it grew less sin- 
ful ! " The revival started, as we commonly 
reckon, with the clarion voice of Wm. Lloyd Gar- 
rison; but he received his first incentives from 
the Southern Quaker, Benjamin Lundy. 

Of course as slavery grew more profitable it 
grew more intolerant, and there came a great 
exodus from the South. This was hastened by 
the passage of severe laws in one state after an- 
other forbidding the teaching of the blacks to 
read, forbidding the manumission of slaves, de- 
barring the Negro of " all rights which the white 
man is bound to respect." A large body of 
Southern Quakers were among these exiles from 
the South. Mr. Cannon, the present Speaker 



BEREA COLLEGE 53 

of the House of Representatives, was bom in 
North Carolina, and his talents would have 
adorned that state had not his people been exiled 
because of their liberal principles. 

The one spot where the Southern Abolitionists 
made a stand for free speech and their rights 
was in eastern Kentucky. There were perhaps 
more of them in that region, and they had a fit 
leader in the person of Cassius M. Clay. This 
fearless and eloquent man defied the " fire-eat- 
ers '' and answered them in their own language. 
It was his pleasant custom to go into a court 
house, schoolhouse, or church-house, and lay be- 
fore him a Bible and a copy of the Constitution ; 
and then he would say, " Gentlemen, there are 
men here who fear neither the law of God nor 
of man, and we have arguments for them." And 
he would draw from his saddle-bags a bowie- 
knife and a revolver. Then he was ready for 
a discussion! 

Old Gen. Clay told me with his own lips how 
he first discovered the significance of the moun- 
tains. He was trying to build up a political 
party in favor of freedom. The men who were 
not slaveholders were of course his natural allies 
— in the Blue Grass region they were the labor- 
ers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechan- 
ics. But these men he found were over-awed 



54f FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

by their employers and unable to stand up and 
vote as the custom then was viva voce for his 
liberal party on election day. " Then," he said, 
" I noticed that the people of the mountains did 
not own slaves and did own land. This made 
them independent, and I saw that there was the 
place where I could build up a party in favor 
of freedom — men who could be independent and 
vote as they believed." With this in view he 
purchased large tracts of mountain land in the 
southern end of Madison County, and here he 
invited an Abolition preacher to make a settle- 
ment, which was speedily called Berea. An 
anti-slavery church became the mother of an 
anti-slavery school. 

The preacher as a man of God rejected the 
use of " carnal weapons," but Gen. Clay gave 
small tracts of land in the vicinity of Berea to 
men who were not so religious and who were 
only too glad to use the revolvers and bowie- 
knives which he furnished for the maintaining of 
free speech! Thus the combination of Gospel 
and fire-arms maintained free speech down to the 
civil war. 

And now let us inquire who was this preacher 
who came into the backwoods of Kentucky to 
face mobs and persecutions? His name was 
John Gregg Fee, scion of a " good Kentucky 



BEREA COLLEGE 55 

family," early called to the ministry ; a man of 
wonderful gifts, combining seriousness with 
cheerfulness, courage with urbanity, a deep 
philosophical mind with a sublime faith in the 
final victory of righteousness. Young Fee was 
brought up in the household of a severe slave- 
holder, and was thus the inheritor of slaves. 

In the pursuit of theological education he en- 
tered Lane Seminary. He has recorded the 
struggle that overtook him there when the sub- 
ject of slavery was brought to his attention. 
Day after day he resorted to a little grove for 
meditation and prayer. He was alive to all the 
consequences of his decision — his father's 
frown, the persecution of his people, but at last, 
as he tells us in the quaint words of his diary, 
" I saw that to have peace I must make the conse- 
cration, and I said : ' Lord, if needs be, make me 
an abolitionist.' In all my life since there have 
been abundant errors, sins, and mistakes, but on 
this point I do not think I ever wavered. I de- 
termined to do God's will regardless of conse- 
quences, to preach the gospel of Impartial love 
in my native state. I have never had to fight 
that battle again. I have never had to consider 
when In the hands of a mob what my course 
should be." 

And he Incurred all the persecutions he antici- 



56 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

pated. Before he had been married a month 
his young wife was riding between him and the 
flying missiles of his enemies. In recent years of 
peace I heard his daughter tell how as a child it 
was a common thing for her mother to be waiting 
with anxiety for her father's return. " We 
children," said the daughter, " never thought 
anything more about mobs than about thunder- 
storms. We supposed everybody had mobs ! " 

And then came help from the North. The 
American Missionary Association, then an un- 
denominational organization, gave Mr. Fee a 
salary of three or four hundred dollars. Later 
they sent other workers into the region. And 
greatest of all came the first Principal of the 
school, Dr. J. A. R. Rogers, worthy descendant 
of the Martyr; a man of scholarship and en- 
thusiasm, raised up by Providence to be the 
founder of a college. 

These men actually made their little school in 
the mountains so popular that many slaveholders 
sent their children; and they had gathered a 
good following when they were interrupted by 
the war. The first trouble came with the John 
Brown raid, and the Berea people were driven 
from the state. They were back in '62 and 
exiled again at the time of Kirby Smith's inva- 
sion. But their teaching lived. The people 



BEREA COLLEGE 57 

who had heard their voices and approved their 
sentiments at heart, stood for hberty and held 
Kentucky in the Union. Jackson county, imme- 
diately east of Berea, sent more men into the 
Union army in proportion to its population than 
any other county in the nation. The great 
mountain region rose up for national unity. 

Speedily after the war the school was resumed, 
and then came the admission of colored students. 
This was a momentous occasion. Many of the 
white students withdrew, though most of them 
came straggling back when the school had begun 
to move forward undisturbed by the change. 
Henry Fairchild, an elder brother of James 
Fairchild, well known President of Oberlin, came 
to Berea as chief executive in '69 and during 
twenty years administered a growing work. It 
was for him to assist in mediating the transition 
to the reign of freedom, to assist the colored 
people in getting the right to testify in court, 
to establish the validity of slave marriages, to 
secure for them their share of the school funds, 
to escape the violence of the Ku-Klux; and he 
lived to see peace and a large measure of justice 
established. 

Then came an interregnum in which Berea 
dropped from public attention and lost some- 



68 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

what of its place in the procession of those good 
causes for which good people pray, 

I may be permitted to speak of my own call 
to this work as providential. With a group of 
fellow-teachers from Oberlin I took a walk for 
recreation through the mountains of West Vir- 
ginia, tracing with one of the old Union officers 
the line of McClellan's first campaign. But we 
were soon absorbed in the study of the mountain 
people and the conditions of isolated life. Some 
years later, while enjoying a brief residence in 
Europe, I received a cablegram announcing my 
election to the Presidency of Berea College, and 
with it came letters from Roswell Smith and 
George W. Cable, asserting their opinion that 
Berea College, because of its history and its 
unique position, was a school of national impor- 
tance, to which one might well give everything 
of life and effort. 

My first important purchase in Kentucky was 
a pair of saddlebags. What other college 
president has the distinction of such accoutre- 
ments ! I started forth, guided by one of Sher- 
man's veterans, to find out whether the mountain 
people would send their children to school, and 
to find out further what manner of school would 
be best adapted to their needs and condition. I 



BEREA COLLEGE 59 

had already spread out the map, communicated 
with the geological and botanical surveys at 
Washington, and marked out that vast region, 
portions of the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, 
Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, which con- 
stitute a region which we Bereans soon named 
Appalachian America — a region greatly varied 
in surface, elevation and climate, but having one 
unvarying characteristic — a country hard to 
travel. Kentucky's part in this vast region is 
a little larger than the combined states of Mas- 
sachusetts and Connecticut. The children of 
that region are bom to isolation. The settlers 
there, coming after the Revolutionary war, 
brought in the civilization of colonial times. 
They were soon shut in by more than mountain 
barriers, for there came feuds between the moun- 
taineer, who was an independent freeman, and 
the Blue Grass magnate, who set up with his 
slaves and retainers as a feudal lord. In those 
mountain homes may be found survivals of much 
that was quaint, primitive, ingenious, simple, 
patriarchal and heroic in the pioneer times. 
The mountaineer needs a friendly interpreter. 
His outward aspect is strange to our eyes. 
Many of his customs seem barbarous. But as 
we approach him sympathetically, realizing his 
history and the conditions under which he lives, 



60 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

we may well believe that if the scions of our 
families who went west along the line of the 
Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, where they 
were kept in perpetual touch with the seaboard 
— if they had gone instead to the mountains 
west of the southern seaboard they would to- 
day be groping there in the same fashion. 

To bring the better elements of civilization 
within reach of this great populatiouj to help 
them to some leadership and some means of 
progress — this seems to me work of national 
importance. It was a great responsibility to 
perfect a program for their relief and to find 
new friends for the enterprise. 

But in both Berea has been really prospered. 
Our program is an unconventional and direct 
one. For those who cannot come to Berea we 
maintain an " extension " service — during the 
period of good roads some of our teachers are 
sent out, preferably a man and his wife^ with 
two young men as cook and hostler, with tents 
and wagons and a stereopticon, to hold " peo- 
ple's institutes '* from county to county, spend- 
ing two or three days in a place. Such gather- 
ings are attended by people from a vast distance. 
Years after the addresses delivered will be re- 
peated almost word for word by appreciative 



BEREA COLLEGE 61 

listeners. Many a time court has adjourned for 
the sake of hearing an address on education. 
Thought is provoked, enterprise is quickened, 
ambition is kindled. The newly awakened and 
struggling public school is encouraged. 

And then for the young men and women who 
come to school. They must have short courses ; 
the practical things poured in upon them; in- 
dustry, skill, — the means of material prosperity, 
combined with the qualifications for good citizen- 
ship. Especially important is the Normal de- 
partment, raising up teachers for the mountain 
schools which are l^ginning to appear. And 
for the few who have the special means and 
capability, an academic or college course. 
Nearly one thousand young people, first and last 
in the course of a year have been finding their 
way to Berea. Some resources have come to us : 
a Brick Yard ; a great Chapel building — every 
brick laid by students ; a Forest Preserve, where 
practical lessons are taught and which consti- 
tutes itself an object lesson that has raised the 
price of mountain land for a hundred miles. 
Such is our work for the mountaineers, the fruits 
of which are coming rapidly to view. 

For nearly forty years the colored students 
have attended Berea freely, never less than one 



62 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

hundred and sometimes twice that number, scat- 
tered through all our grades and classes ac- 
cording to their proficiency; the only question 
asked being whether they could pass the exam- 
inations and pay the modest fees. 

Now Berea has no fanatical views to express. 
We do not affirm that such mingling of the races 
would be best under all conditions, but we must 
testify to the truth of what we have seen and 
known. Under the conditions in Berea it has 
been for good and not for evil. We have forced 
the opinion of none of our students. No one 
has been compelled to associate intimately with 
any one who was distasteful to him ; but in the 
legitimate interests of the school-room and the 
playground race prejudice and suspicion have 
been diminished. The negro has had the sober- 
ing opportunity to measure himself by the Cau- 
casian, and the white student has been emanci- 
pated from the narrowness and bigotry of caste. 
By this long experience, by the testimony of all 
its teachers and the vast majority of its students, 
by the absence of scandal or collision, by the 
raising up of a group of colored leaders who 
are sought for above others in all the towns and 
cities of Kentucky, Berea has " demonstrated 
the practicability of the ideal." 

But the Legislature of Kentucky last winter 



BEREA COLLEGE 63 

passed a law, with Berea specially In mind, for- 
bidding any school or institution to receive both 
white and colored students unless the one race 
or color should be established in a separate de- 
partment not less than twenty-five miles from 
the other: and this on penalty of a fine of $1,000 
for the Institution, $1,000 for each of its 
teachers, and $50 for each of its pupils.^ 

This attack arose from no fault or scandal 
real or pretended in connection with Berea Col- 
lege. It was simply a part of the Bourbon 
movement which had extended over the whole 
South. To understand the South we must re- 
member that the Southern States have never had 
a really democratic government and that the 



1 In its final form the law stands as follows : 

1. That it shall be unlawful for any person, corpora- 
tion, or association of persons, to maintain or operate 
any college, school or institution where persons of the 
white and negro races are both received as pupils for in- 
struction, and any person or corporation who shall 
operate or maintain any such college, school or insti- 
tution, shall be fined $1,000, and any person or cor- 
poration who may be convicted of violating the pro- 
visions of this act shall be fined $100 for each day 
they may operate said college, school or institution, 
after such conviction. 

2. That any instructor who shall teach in any school, 
college or institution, when members of said two races 
are received as pupils for instruction, shall be guilty 
of operating and maintaining same, and fined as pro- 
vided in the first section hereof. 

3. It shall be unlawful for any white person to at- 
tend any school or institution where negroes are re- 



64 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

majority of the people of the South have no 
comprehension of what fairness, equahty, and 
republican institutions really are. We are mis- 
taken if we suppose that the attack upon a 
postmaster here and a colored collector of reve- 
nue in another place arises from some profound 
racial instinct. It arises from a motive that is 
much nearer the surface; there is some white 
man who wants the job! And then there was 
the feeling that the political leaders of the South 
would lose their grip. It cost them more every 
year in silver dollars and strong liquors to bring 
out the faithful on election day; and a good 
blow at the colored brother would fire the 
Southern heart of the ignorant masses and help 
the politician. This hue and cry swept over 
Tennessee two years before, and it reached Ken- 
tucky last winter. 

ceived as pupils or receive instruction, and it shall be 
unlawful for any negro or colored person to attend any 
school or institution where white persons are received 
as pupils or receive instruction. Any person so of- 
fending shall be fined $50 for each day he attends 
such institution or school. Provided that the pro- 
visions of this law shall not apply to any penal insti- 
tution or house of reform. 

4. Nothing in this act shall be construed to prevent 
any private school, college or institution of learning 
from maintaining a separate and distinct branch there- 
of, in a different locality, not less than twenty-five 
miles distant, for the education of one race or color. 

5. This act shall not take effect or be in operation 
before the fifteenth day of July, 1904. 



BEREA COLLEGE 66 

The Bourbons are to be pitied as well as con- 
demned. They are not of course the whole 
South but they are the " bulldozing " and blat- 
ant element, and they really believe that civiliza- 
tion will yield to them. They expect to defeat 
President Roosevelt at the next election as cer- 
tainly as they expected to win in the rebellion of 
'61. They expect to change the customs of 
Europe as well as America and gradually extend 
race prejudice over the face of Christendom. 
They will have their temporary victories but we 
do not believe they will set back the march of the 
age. 

What Berea should do under these new con- 
ditions has been a serious question, a question 
which its trustees have taken time to consider. 
Whatever they do they are likely to Incur the 
blame of the thoughtless, but they will certainly 
strive to do that which will have the commenda- 
tion of posterity and of Almighty God. 

First : They have decided to contest the con- 
stitutionality of this law ; in behalf of humanity 
white and black we resist this legislative usurpa- 
tion. There Is a limit to the police powers of a 
State. A State may prescribe the methods for 
the conduct of a school which Is supported by 
the State, but where a private institution, or an 
individual teacher chooses to use a school for all 



66 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

comers, the same being orderly and law-abiding, 
the state may not enter the private domain of 
personal liberty and interfere. So we contest, 
and the court shall give the verdict. 

Meanwhile we are assisting our colored stu- 
dents of last year to attend Fisk University 
and other schools of their choice, paying their 
railroad fare and insuring them against financial 
loss because of this new law. What will be the 
final way in which Berea College shall continue 
its best service to the colored race we cannot now 
predict, but we shall find that way and be faith- 
ful to the interests of the colored people. The 
perversity and blindness of our fanatical neigh- 
bors imposes upon us new burdens, but we refuse 
to be discouraged. It is merely the bringing to 
the surface of certain dregs of slavery wliich 
however disagreeable cannot stop the progress 
of good things at the South.^ 

1 The extent to which Berea has influenced its white 
students in the direction of world-wide Christian senti- 
ment, is shown by the following resolutions adopted by 
the white students on the retirement of the colored : 

BEREA STUDENTS SEND GREETINGS TO THE 
COLORED STUDENTS OF LAST YEAR. 



EESOLUTIONS ADOPTED IN C'HAPEL BY UNANIMOUS RISING 
VOTE, SEPT. 14, 1904. 



The students of Berea College at the opening of the 
new term send greeting to the colored students who are 



BEREA COLLEGE 67 

There seems to be at this time a conspiracy 
against the weak — a concerted effort to bring 
up an evil report against the Negro and preju- 
dice against him his old friends at the North. 
" We of the South," say these deceptive voices, 
" we of the South understand the Negro, we are 
his true friends. The Northerners have made a 
mistake in wasting money trying to teach him 
that for which he is not fitted. Let us alone 
and we will bring things out all right." The 
Southerner does not understand the Negro. He 
is familiar with the low type of Negro but he 
has never studied the Negro with a view to learn- 
ing his capabilities, his aspirations, his human 
possibilities. The Southerner has been a bad 
pedagogue in the treatment of the Negro. It 
is the simpliest truism that " if you call a man a 

this year debarred from tlie privileges of the Institu- 
tion. 
Friends and Fellow-students: 

As we meet for the time under new conditions to 
enjoy the great advantages of Berea College, we think 
at once of you who are now deprived of these privileges. 

Our sense of justice shows us that others have the 
same rights as ourselves, and the teachings of Christ 
teach us to *^ remember them that are in bonds as bound 
with them." 

We realize that you are excluded from the class- 
rooms of Berea College, which we so highly prize, by 
no fault of your own, and that this hardship is a part 
of a long line of deprivations under which you live. 
Because you were born in a race long oppressed and 
largely untaught and undeveloped, heartless people feel 



68 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

thief he will steal '' ; and in calling the colored 
man a " nigger " and attributing to him all 
baseness and inefficiency, the South has in the 
most effective way repressed his manhood and 
discouraged his desire for improvement. 

The Northern efforts for Negro education 
have been liable to the usual proportion of hu- 
man mistakes and errors, but on the whole they 
have been intelligent — and more than that, 
effective. Probably no money has ever been 
expended in any philanthropic cause which has 
produced larger results. The distinctive schools 
in the old slave states supported by Northern 
philanthropy have raised up a body of intelli- 
gent, self-respecting, civilized colored people, 
and this superior class, created by Northern 

more free to do you wrong, and thoughtless people meet 
your attempts at self-improvement with indifference or 
scorn. Even good people sometimes fear to recognize 
your worth, or take your part in a neighborly way, 
because of the violence of the prejudices around us. 

We are glad that we have known you, or known about 
you, and that we know you are rising above all discour- 
agements, and showing a capacity and a character that 
give promise for your people. We confidently expect 
to hear of your success at Fisk University, Hampton, 
or other schools, and that you will help to vindicate the 
reputation of your people in the eyes even of those who 
desire to see no manly or womanly qualities in the 
Negro race. We know that you can compel increasing 
respect by your modesty, industry, skill, honesty, truth- 
fulness, and a God-fearing and God-trusting life. In 
cultivating these qualities and teaching them among 
your people you will be engaged in as noble and heroic 



BEREA COLLEGE 69 

sagacity and philanthropy, since the civil war, 
constitutes the hope of the race. 

No wise or considerate man will judge any 
race by its masses, but rather its leaders and 
representatives. A race that can produce one or 
two great men can produce others ; and we have 
abundant testimony from the best people of the 
South that the Negro can rise and is rising. 
Yea, that in whole groups of families he has 
risen to a place of responsibility, efficiency, and 
boundless promise. 

The practical arrangements by which Berea 
pursues its ideals will be of interest. The Insti- 
tution frankly undertakes to provide some pro- 
gram of progress for any young person who 
presents himself with three qualifications : First, 
he (or she) must be not less than fifteen years of 

a work as that of any patriot who ever toiled and suf- 
fered for his people's good. And you will always have 
our friendship, and the friendship of the best people 
throughout the world. We hope never to be afraid or 
ashamed to show our approval of any colored person 
who has the character and worth of most of the col- 
ored students of Berea. 

We are glad that the College is providing funds to 
assist you in continuing your education, and we are 
sure the Institution will find ways in which to do its 
full duty by the colored race. We know that you have 
as much right to its care and help as we have, and we 
shall cheerfully give up a part of our own advantages 
if necessary in order that the colored people may have 
their just share. 



70 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

age. Second, evidence must be shown of good 
moral character. And third, the apphcant must 
bring that unequivocal form of recommendation 
— enough money for an initial payment of 
about $15! 

For those least advanced there is provided a 
system of " Model Schools.'' These schools are 
arranged according to grades, from the Primary 
through the eightli grade. Most of these grades 
are subdivided Into two or three sections. This 
enables us to group the older students, well- 
^own boys and girls who are in elementary sub- 
jects, by themselves, separate from the children 
who are pursuing like branches. These Model 
Schools are of value for practice work on the 
part of the advanced Normal students, but their 
chief value is for the pupils who attend them. 
These pupils in many cases come long distances, 
are representatives of the " leading families " in 
their communities, and though they may remain 
in Berea only two or three terms they will go 
back with larger ideals than their neighbors and 
will become the founders of a new state of affairs 
at home. Except for the subjects which they 
study they are practically enjoying the same 
kind of educational advantages which belong to 
students who go away from home to college. 
They attend college prayers, become acquainted 



BEREA COLLEGE 71 

with the most aspiring young people from many 
and distant communities, conduct literary socie- 
ties, and gather those precious elements of per- 
sonal enhancement which come from contact with 
intellectual and spiritual life. 

The studies in the Model Schools are the com- 
mon branches, with industrial training, music, 
drawing, and lessons in conduct and character 
based upon the English Bible. The large num- 
ber of students who get a few terms in these 
Model Schools and get nothing further, return 
to their distant homes to exert a leavening in- 
fluence of incalculable value. Where only one or 
two come from a far-away county, they are likely 
to back-slide; but where they come in groups 
of a dozen or a score, they go back to pro- 
duce a noticeable impression upon their county. 
The mingling of white and colored students in 
the Model Schools has been a marked feature 
until this year, and has led to advancement on 
both sides in the art of getting on together. 
The distance from which the mountain students 
are drawn may be tersely illustrated by a mere 
list of the places from which the students came 
last winter who were members of one division 
of the A Intermediate school : Berea, Beattyville, 
Lee Co., Level Green, Rockcastle Co., Dallas, 
Pulaski Co., Williamsburg, W. Va., Sidell, Clay 



72 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Co., London, Laurel Co., Jinks, Estill Co., Gray- 
hawk, Jackson Co., Wallaceton, Madison Co., 
Wesley ville. Carter Co., Conkling, Owsley Co., 
Waslota, Bell Co., Cody, Knott Co., Pear Tree, 
Breathitt Co., Blanche, Va., Newman, Illinois, 
Mansfield, O., Paint Lick, Garrard Co., Nina, 
Garrett Co., Pleasant View, Whitley Co., Viper, 
Perry Co., Campton, Wolfe Co., Augusta, 
Bracken Co., Indianapolis, Ind., Lexington, 
Fayette Co., Salyersville, Magoffin Co., Nash- 
bie, Va. 

A Model School student who is as far ad- 
vanced as the A Intermediate has the privilege of 
selecting a trade or occupation in which he 
receives training and earns more or less wages 
while continuing in school. For these " ap- 
prentice students " we have not a very wide 
diversity of industries but have selected those 
which are most adapted to the country and in 
general most available. The young men can 
take Farming, Carpentry, Printing, Brick-mak- 
ing or Brick-laying. The young women can 
take Sewing, Nursing, Cooking, or Laundry 
work. 

Pupils who are advanced in their studies be- 
yond the eighth grade have the option of pur- 
suing any one of several courses. For those 
who are preparing to teach there is a Normal 



BEREA COLLEGE 73 

Course of three years. This embraces the 
studies required for a State Certificate in Ken- 
tucky, and in addition other subjects of general 
educational value. In fact we insist that aU our 
Normal students shall go forth as advocates of 
industry and the skill which industrial training 
yields. All the Normal students have lessons 
in drawing and Horticulture. The young men 
have some training in the use of tools and the 
young women some training in " Home Science." 
The Normal Department strikes all our visitors 
as remarkable from the fact that a great major- 
ity of its students are young men. This is a 
wholesome state of affairs. The young men 
may not pursue teaching for many years but 
they will pass on to positions of influence in the 
community as business men, magistrates and 
school trustees, and thus be enabled to give to the 
new and struggling public schools of the South 
a standing which they could not otherwise secure. 
The demand for teachers, due to the sudden 
installation of a school system in so many states, 
has been very great. It has of course necessi- 
tated the commissioning of many poorly 
equipped teachers. Almost anything In this line 
was made available to meet the situation and open 
the schools. We have known more than one wise 
county superintendent who would select a bright 



74 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

and devoted young man or young woman and 
say frankly, " Now you cannot pass the exam- 
inations, but I will give you a certificate; you 
will teach the school this year the best you can, 
but you must promise me that you will use the 
money you draw for teaching this school in go- 
ing to Berea and getting ready so that you can 
pass an honest examination next year ! " 

Side by side with this Normal Course are two 
Academy Courses, one fitting directly for college 
— four years' work with the usual preparatory 
studies; and the other a two years' course of 
general education fitting directly for life, and 
embracing such practical and cultural studies as 
Book-keeping, Civil Government, Outlines of 
History, Physiology, Physics, Readings from 
Great Authors, Elements of Economics, and 
Elementary Ethics. Students in this Course 
may also elect more of commercial branches if 
they are looking forward to a business life, or 
more of Horticulture If they are expecting to 
be farmers, or more of music and Home Science 
if their destination is the fireside. 

Above all these comes the College proper. It 
is quite a problem as to what kind of collegiate 
education should be offered In these surround- 
ings. A certain proportion of the young people 
who come to us show their talent and ambition 



BEREA COLLEGE 75 

and need all the discipline and information they 
can get for the difficult positions of leadership 
among their people. We have not cheapened 
the College Course for these students. It em- 
braces the traditional four years but omits the 
fancy electives which decorate a college course 
in most Northern institutions. It contains, how- 
ever, the branches — Literature, Science, His- 
tory, Philosophy, etc. — which were the staple 
in American colleges a generation ago and which 
are still elected by the great majority of stu- 
dents. These are taught with standard text- 
books by teachers of fine training and ability, 
so that the young man who graduates from 
Berea College can enter upon professional 
studies anywhere and find himself in step with 
the world. 

This high standard keeps our College classes 
small — only eleven graduates last year. 
Nevertheless the College Course justifies itself 
each year and gives a tone to the work in all 
departments. The students who take College 
courses in Berea live in an atmosphere of prac- 
tical things and drink in a missionary spirit 
along with their Geology and mountain air. 
The time is at hand when this College will be 
training a much larger proportion of the leaders 
for a wide region. The children of our present 



76 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

students will be coming to us only a few years 
hence — coming from homes which can lend in- 
telligent cooperation, and coming prepared to 
take collegiate courses. They will know Berea 
and look to us for that education which is called 
higher as well as for the more practical and ele- 
mentary forms. 

The equipment of an institution which is 
doing such varied work is a matter of decided 
interest. If our administration is thoughtful 
and consistent we shall be able to carry forward 
these different types of education each in its 
proper place and each by its proper methods. 
The Brick-Yard, Planing Mill, Saw Mill, Silo, 
Cabinet Shop, Steam Laundry, and Power 
Plant furnish labor for those who need to help 
themselves towards education, and, with that 
labor, a very real impulse towards scientific study 
and genuine discipline. At the same time these 
industrial outfits present the best of problems 
for those who are pursuing science in a methodi- 
cal way. 

The natural surroundings in Berea are 
beautiful. The campus of seventy acres oc- 
cupies a ridge lying between the Blue Grass 
region to the west and the Cumberland Moun- 
tains to the east. We are near the water-shed 
between the great valleys of the Kentucky and 



BEREA COLLEGE 71 

the Cumberland rivers. Two miles east is the 
pinnacle from which Daniel Boone first gazed 
out upon the Blue Grass when he had traversed 
the mountain region from North Carolina. Our 
Fay Forest preserve of over three thousand 
acres shows a great variety of forest conditions 
and of picturesque beauty. And the greatest 
gift of our Forest Preserve is the ten mountain 
springs which Dr. Pearsons has generously 
piped down to Berea, so that we have an abun- 
dance of mountain water in all our buildings. 

The attendance of students is peculiar in its 
fluctuations. The rural public schools of Ken- 
tucky begin in July and close at Christmas. A 
great army of our young people teach during 
these six summer and fall months. They are 
thus kept away from Berea during the fall term, 
but they return at New Year's time, bringing 
with them in many cases their older scholars, so 
that the number of students at Berea is doubled 
in a week. Then comes the time of crowding 
and discomfort ; three or four students must live 
in one room and good-nature and patience are 
put to the test. It is hoped that the Brick- Yard 
and Planing Mill and the generosity of our 
friends will provide more shelter before another 
winter. 

The social and religious arrangements of the 



78 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

school are natural and wholesome. The students 
gather each day for chapel services, the more 
advanced students by themselves in order that 
they may not be bored by the more elementary, 
lessons and repeated notices which are necessary 
for the larger number of students who are less 
advanced and whose stay in Berea is shorter. 

The good records made by our students are a 
perpetual reward and incentive. Our mountain 
students are holding county ofBces, preaching 
the gospel, developing the resources of the 
country, and advancing civilization generally 
throughout Appalachian America. The teach- 
ing profession has claimed among our colored 
graduates by far the greater number. A gath- 
ering of the colored teachers of Kentucky is 
almost the same thing as a reunion of Berea 
students; and outside the State Berea teachers 
are doing distinguished service at such insti- 
tutions as the industrial school at Manassas, 
Va., and the Okolona College recently founded 
by our graduate, Wallace A. Battle in Missis- 
sippi. Perhaps the best conductor of teachers' 
institutes in the State is our Prof. Frank L. 
Williams, of Covington. 

But outside the teaching profession we have 
such preachers as Dr. James Bond, of Nashville, 
and large groups of physicians, business men 



BEREA COLLEGE 79 

and prosperous farmers and mechanics. Such 
records prove to us anew each year that the best 
investment in this world is an investment in men 
and women. 



Ill 

TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE 

BY 
PROFESSOE ROSCOE CONKLING BRUCE 



TIJSKEaEE INSTITUTE 

It was Emerson who said that institutions are 
the lengthened shadows of great men. Cer- 
tainly Tuskegee Institute is the lengthened 
shadow of Booker Washington. Tuskegee and 
the Odyssey sing the triumph of personahty over 
circumstance ; each hero overcame men and gods 
and nature by dint of " cool intelligence, patient 
courage and a tenacious heart." 

The cramped log cabin, windowless and 
squalid, with its gratuitous cat hole and its 
potato hole ready at hand — this cabin in 
which the unfathered child was born some un- 
noted day, the bundle of filthy rags laid upon 
a dirt floor on which the two little brothers and 
the little sister slept, the wonderful grape-vine 
telegraph, the delectable ginger cakes (" Those 
cakes," says Washington, "seemed to me abso- 
lutely the most tempting and desirable things I 
had ever seen." — ), the cruel wooden shoes, the 
ordeal of the flax shirt, the heart-felt sorrow 
for " Mars Billy " killed in battle, the profound 
yearning for freedom of which many a plaintive 
melody was the voice, the wild immeasurable 
83 



84 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

ecstacy and the deep brooding gloom when free- 
dom was at last vouchsafed — from these things, 
compact of smiles and tears, Tuskegee sprang. 

The coal mine in Kanawha Valley could not 
bury the spirit of this boy. A chance reference 
of two miners, in their rambling talk, to Hamp- 
ton hinted an opportunity. Hid in the dark- 
ness of the mine, the urchin crept with beating 
heart as close to the men as he dared ; his keen 
wits understood, his boyish ambitions now had a 
definite object, he made a high resolve. A 
thrifty Yankee woman from Vermont took Wash- 
ington into her household and gave him a chance 
to earn and save a little money ; she taught him 
that cleanliness is godliness ! With the hesitant 
consent of his untutored mother, a few dollars 
from his good elder brother, and the wondering 
sympathy of the colored neighbors, the boy — 
all his earthly possessions tucked into a shabby 
little satchel — started at last for Hampton with 
a stout heart. 

He reached Richmond, tired and hungry and 
dirty, penniless, friendless, discouraged. Under 
a board sidewalk at a place where It was some- 
what elevated, he lay down to sleep for the night, 
and this was his bed during his stay in the city. 
Finally, he saved enough money from helping to 
unload a ship to pay his way to Hampton; he 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 85 

reached the school with a surplus of exactly fifty 
cents with which to begin his education! But, 
he passed his entrance examination, he swept 
the room clean! 

The novelties of the new life bewildered Wash- 
ington but he adjusted himself to the conditions 
by dint of patient effort and many embarrass- 
ments. The puzzle of two sheets on the bed he 
solved gravely. " The first night I slept under 
both of them, and the second night I slept on 
top of both of them ; but by watching the other 
boys I learned my lesson in this, and have been 
trying to follow it ever since and to teach it to 
others." His experience at Hampton advanced 
his literary education, trained him to continuous 
and intelligent work with his hands, and awak- 
ened genuine respect for labor ; but most impor- 
tant of all, brought him into contact with Gen- 
eral Armstrong. From Hawaii Armstrong had 
journeyed, in 1860, to Williams College to sit at 
the feet of Mark Hopkins: the gift that Mark 
Hopkins gave Armstrong, Armstrong gave the 
shy Negro lad from the mines of West Virginia 
— and that gift was consecrated common sense. 

After being graduated, Washington taught 
school at Maiden, West Virginia, for two years 
where he rendered himself eccentric by Insisting 
that the pupils be clean as well as grammatical ! 



86 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

In the Fall of 1878 he spent some months of 
study at Wayland Seminary in Washington. 
The next Spring General Armstrong asked him 
to return to Hampton partly as a teacher and 
partly as an advanced student. Washington 
proved his efficiency there and was asked to take 
charge of the night school which Armstrong was 
about to start for the benefit of such students as 
could not pay even a part of their expenses ; the 
enrolment grew rapidly and Washington gained 
valuable experience. 

The call to Tuskegee came in 1881. In re- 
sponse to the enquiry of George W. Campbell, 
an ex-slaveholder, and Lewis Adams, an ex-slave, 
General Armstrong recommended Booker T. 
Washington to teach the Negro school at Tuske- 
gee. Washington reached the town early in 
June and spent the first month in making a social 
survey. With a mule and a cart he drove all 
over Macon county of which Tuskegee is the 
county seat ; he ate and slept with the people and 
studied their actual life on the plantation, in the 
home and the church and the school. At that 
time there were 4,500 whites in Macon and 
nearly three times as many blacks. The odori- 
ferous one-room cabin stuffed with parents and 
children and nondescript relatives ; the fat pork 
and corn bread regimen; the high-priced organ 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 87 

to satisfy musical aspirations as against one 
rusty fork to convey food to nine or ten 
mouths ; the Saturday exodus from plantation to 
town; the cruelty of the crop lien and the stu- 
pidity of the one-crop system; farming by 
spasms and not by calculation ; the three month 
ungraded school ; the astonishing fervor in relig- 
ion matched by an equally astonishing laxity in 
morals — these things the new teacher saw and 
felt and thought about and argued with the 
elders of the people. 

Now the New England curriculum was not 
designed with an eye to such conditions ; it pre- 
supposes a well-ordered home life which was as 
well understood in some parts of the Black Belt 
as cuneiform inscriptions! With something of 
the spirit of that Chinese emperor who burnt the 
libraries to emancipate the scholars from inap- 
plicable traditions, Washington determined to 
make his own curriculum — a curriculum ad- 
justed to the actual needs of the particular peo- 
ple he dealt with rather than to their theoretical 
needs. He was fresh from Hampton where Gen- 
eral Armstrong, fortified with his experience as 
commander of black troops and as viceroy of the 
Freedmen's Bureau, had boldly blazed the way. 
The heart and the hands as well as the head need 
disciplining. 



88 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

On July 4, 1881, the school was opened in a 
shanty church with thirty students and an in- 
spired teacher. Nobody under fifteen years of 
age was admitted and none who had received no 
previous schooling; some of the pupils were 
thirty to forty years old and most had been or 
were school teachers. To a surprising facility 
for memorizing rules and definitions this motley 
array linked a surprising inability to apply the 
rules and appreciate the definitions* At the end 
of the first month nearly fifty persons were en- 
rolled; two weeks later an additional teacher 
reached Tuskegee. Educated in the public 
schools of Ohio, Olivia A. Davidson was also a 
graduate of Hampton and of the Massachu- 
setts State Normal School at Framingham; 
equipped with a large fund of experience in 
teaching Southern schools in city and country, 
she was a teacher of notable skill, a woman of in- 
domitable energy and noble spirit. Miss David- 
son re-enforced Mr. Washington's determination 
to have the students study things as well as 
books, acquire wholesome personal habits as well 
as desirable intellectual habits, learn the parts 
and the care of their bodies as well as the parts 
of speech and their use. 

About this time an abandoned farm one mile 
from town came into the market ; the ground has 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 89 

an excellent natural drainage and many other 
advantages as a school site. The owner asked 
$500 for the land, and although the Nile valley 
may possess a slight pre-eminence in point of 
natural fertility, that was really a low price. 
With the assistance of General Marshall, Hamp- 
ton's treasurer, the tract was bought. In three 
months, thanks to the festival and sup- 
pers arranged by the resourceful Miss David- 
son and to a personal canvass of the whites and 
blacks of the community, enough money was 
raised to repay the General's personal Loan of 
$250 ; and in two months more the last cent of 
the purchase money was paid. And so a perma- 
nent site was secured. The farm's stable and 
the hen-house were deftly metamorphosed into 
recitation rooms. 

The first industry introduced was of course 
farming. The actual need of vegetables and 
com and hogs and chickens for students and 
teachers to eat and the pressing need of provid- 
ing some method for students to help support 
themselves in school were the immediate reasons 
for recourse to agriculture, but a fundamental 
factor was the fact that this industry would be 
of prime industrial importance to the students 
and their prejudices against it should at all haz- 
ards be overcome. In the eighties the average 



90 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

student fled farming as though it were the pesti- 
lence; but nowadays there is no more popular 
study at Tuskegee than agriculture, and the im- 
provements in methods of teaching have invested 
it with high educational value. 

In point of fact, every one of the thirty-six 
industries now taught at Tuskegee Institute was 
originally introduced in obedience to some 
frowning fact; whim and caprice and the smile 
of fashion played no part in the matter. Brick- 
making was introduced because bricks were 
needed for a new building and, there being no 
brick-yard in the neighborhood, the price of 
bricks " f . o. b.'' Tuskegee was beyond the 
school's purse. The growth in number of indus- 
tries has been no hothouse growth. 

In passing, I may indicate the spirit in which 
the embarrassments incident to the first introduc- 
tion of an industry by inexperienced persons, 
were met. It takes 25,000 bricks to make that 
most cunning contrivance, a kiln, and to burn 
one takes a week. Three several times the at- 
tempt to complete a kiln of bricks was tried and 
three several times the costly experiment collap- 
sed in failure. Without a dollar to pay the cost 
of another trial, Mr. Washington pawned his 
watch and with the meagre proceeds rallied his 
men. This time, amid great rejoicing, the kiln 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 91 

was completed. The brick-yard is the best in- 
vestment the school ever made; everj^ brick in 
the buildings on the grounds was made by the 
students and a profitable trade with the towns- 
people has been developed. In the handsome 
and durable brick lay an irrefragable argument 
that the new idea in education is sound. These 
gratifying results are the proceeds of quiet faith 
and simple perseverance. 

Among the colored people of the State it was 
noised that no student, however well-to-do his 
parents might be, could attend Tuskegee unless 
he studied a trade as well as the three R's. This 
raised a very storm of protest: by letter, by 
messenger, and in person Mr. Washington was 
informed in effect that " the more books, the 
larger they were, and the longer the titles 
printed upon them, the better pleased the stu- 
dents and their parents would be." This illumi- 
nating information had one important effect; it 
showed the Principal the importance of his using 
every opportunity to travel about the State 
addressing the colored people upon the inade- 
quacies of the traditional teaching and the ad- 
vantages of the new. At any rate he did 
conduct such a campaign of education and the 
institute's attendance did not decline. 

Without a dormitory and a boarding depart- 



92 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

ment, the school could not accustom the students 
to well-ordered home life. The very first build- 
ing put up was a dormitory , Porter Hall. 
Later a dining-room was added, the cooking 
being done out of doors in pots and skillets, 
Black Belt fashion. Small local contributions 
to the fund for this building were supplemented 
by funds raised by Miss Davidson in the North. 
The new building was dedicated to the education 
of Negroes by Honorable Waddy Thompson in 
the presence of the county officials and the most 
eminent white citizens of the communitj^; the 
delight of the colored people was unbounded for 
they did not forget that on this soil just sixteen 
years before to teach a black man to read was a 
criminal offense. 

Immediately upon the opening of the board- 
ing department, a steady stream of students 
came pouring in not only from the Alabama 
Black Belt but from Georgia and South Caro- 
lina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Two 
difficulties were accentuated — that of securing 
the food supply and that of providing bed- 
rooms. The charge for board, room, fuel, and 
washing was eight dollars a month and a part 
of this amount was offset by credits for produc- 
tive work done by students in the industries. 
Bricks may be made without straw, but where is 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 93 

the cook who can make bread without flour? 
The boarding department was rich in good in- 
tentions, but it lacked hard cash. To provide 
more bedrooms, the school rented certain tumble- 
down cabins nearby; during the winter months 

— and winter is most wintry in the Sunny South 

— the young men who slept in the cabins suf- 
fered. More than once a square shouldered, 
deep-chested, taciturn man went at midnight 
from shanty to shanty to see his boys. Hud- 
dled with four or five room-mates about a cheer- 
less fire and wrapped in a blanket, was many an 
uncomplaining Negro lad, shivering from cold 
but thankful for his opportunity to rise. 

The problem of providing systematically for 
the support of capable but penniless students in 
school grew pressing and, following the Hamp- 
ton precedent, Principal Washington opened a 
night school. The night-school student worked 
doggedly ten hours a day at some trade or indus- 
try and studied the three R's two hours each 
night, receiving credits on the school's books for 
his work at a rate somewhat in excess of his cur- 
rent board bill. The night school acted as a 
severe process of selection and the student who 
emerged from its toils into the privileges of the 
day school, with its four days of books and two 



94 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

days of manual labor, was pretty certain to pos- 
sess solidity. 

The number of students continued to increase 
and a girPs dormitory to cost about $10,000 
was planned. Although there was not a cent 
with which to begin the building. Principal 
Washington decided to name it — names are 
plenty — and the name selected was Alabama 
Hall. Again contributions were solicited from 
the neighbors. In the nick of time a telegram 
arrived from General Armstrong asking Mr. 
Washington to come north to spend a month 
travelling with him and the Hampton quartette 
through the principal cities of New England 
and the Middle states in behalf of TusTcegee. In 
this way the good General introduced Mr. Wash- 
ington and his work to the people of the north. 
The erection of Alabama Hall was assured and 
soon after Principal Washington began his long, 
single-handed, but notably successful campaign 
in the north for funds to continue and develop 
the work of Tuskegee. 

How to get a hearing from the dominant 
class in the South was still a problem for Mr. 
Washington; and an invitation to address the 
International Meeting of Christian Workers in 
Atlanta, followed by an invitation to speak at 
the opening of the Cotton States and Interna- 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 95 

tional Exposition In the same city, offered a 
ready solution. " That man's speech," said 
Clark Howell to James Creelman, when Wash- 
ington concluded the Exposition speech, — " that 
man's speech is the beginning of a moral revolu- 
tion in America.'' 

It was in 1893 that Mr. Washington married 
his present wife (nee Murray), a graduate of 
Fisk University. Teachers and students go to 
her in time of doubt for guidance, in time of 
struggle for fortitude, at all times for motherly 
sympathy and encouragement. The social life 
of the community she has organized, giving It 
wholesome impulses and making Tuskegee home, 
and teachers and students members of one great 
family. And her labors with the women of the 
town of Tuskegee and of Russell Plantation — 
not to mention her interest In the larger activi- 
ties of the federations of colored women's clubs 
- — stimulate the social conscience and arouse to 
emulation. 

The rest Is fresh in your minds — the Farm- 
ers' Conferences, the National Negro Business 
League, the national reputation won for the in- 
stitute by the constant public speaking of the 
Principal, his academic honors at Harvard and 
at Dartmouth, the visit of President McKInley, 
the hearty reception accorded Up From Slavery 



96 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

in many lands and climes; and the stream of 
gifts that have made possible the Tuskegee of 
to-day. 

Hastily I have sketched, anecdotal fashion, 
the life and striving of Tuskegee up to very 
recent years. Since its foundation, the school 
has sent out into the world more than 6,000 men 
and women who had completed a partial or the 
full course ; to all parts of the South these men 
and women have scattered and have won or are 
winning the rewards of intelligent industry and 
generous service. Last year (1903-4) the total 
enrolment of the institute was 1,500; and the 
total number of ofBcers, teachers, and other em- 
ployees was 151. The total valuation of the 
school's real and personal property was $696,- 
000, the endowment amounted to $1,030,000, 
and the annual current expenses foot up to about 
$160,000. Friends of the late W^illiam H. 
Baldwin, Jr. — than whom Tuskegee never had 
a wiser counsellor or a nobler friend — are now 
gathering funds to erect at the school some fit- 
ting memorial to his faith in black men and his 
devotion to their uplift. Of the annual current 
expenses only $70,000 are now assured in ad- 
vance; omitting the need of expenditures for 
permanent improvements, this leaves $90,000 to 
be collected each year mainly by the personal 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 97 

efforts of the Principal. This means that Mr. 
Washington must raise on an average $246 
every day in the year in order to provide merely 
for the current expenses. 

Two remarks cannot be omitted. In the first 
place, no dollar has ever been " begged " for 
Tuskegee; on the platform and elsewhere the 
work the institution is actually doing has been 
presented clearly and the needs stated frankly. 
Tuskegee so largely enjoys a nation's interest 
and sympathy because, along with many another 
institution, it is doing that nation's work. In 
the second place, the strain incident to the ad- 
ministration of an extremely difficult educational 
experiment and a great industrial community; 
the burden of continual travel and incessant 
public discourse; the inevitable misunderstand- 
ings of public life in America, increased an hun- 
dred fold for that rare black man who seeks to 
serve and to convince the white north, the white 
south, and the Negro people ; the unceasing ap- 
plication of every leisure moment to the further 
study of Negro problems and to the preparation 
of magazine articles and books; the wear and 
tear of exercising a potent constructive influence 
in every field of Negro enterprise; the infinite 
anxiety which hovers like a shadow, menaces like 
a demon, and gripes the heart with a hand as 



98 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

cold as death^s, — this is the price Booker Wash- 
ington pays to serve his people and his country. 

The productive work of Tuskegee is funda- 
mental pedagogically and deserves careful at- 
tention. Foi: 23 years the institution has been 
in process of construction and has relied very 
largely upon the student-body for skilled and 
unskilled labor. To display the effectiveness of 
this labor and the opportunities the students have 
for applying the principles learned in their in- 
dustrial and academic classes, it may be worth 
while to describe a few of the products of a 
few of the shops last year. 

The brick-yard made two million one hundred 
thousand bricks. The contrast between the 
bricks in Cassedy Hall, one of the earlier build- 
ings, and the bricks in Douglass Hall, recently 
completed, exhibits the notable advance made in 
this industry. The improvement is due to the 
fact that the Cassedy Hall bricks were labori- 
ously made by hand (at the rate of 8,900 per 
day of 10 hours), whereas the Douglass Hall 
bricks were made by steam machinery (at the 
rate of 30,000 per day). Moreover, the brick- 
layers have been increasing their efSciency from 
year to year. Anent the use of modern ma- 
chinery at the brickyard, it is interesting to note 
that, whereas in the old days boys were assigned 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 99 

to the brickyard vi et armis, now the waiting 
list of eager applicants is a yard long ! 

These bricks were laid by the Masonry Di- 
vision, which last year completed four large 
buildings, — the Huntington Memorial Building, 
Douglass Hall, the Office Building, and Emery 
Dormitory No. 1. In addition the Division al- 
most completed Emery Dormitory No. 2, and 
did much other brickwork such as that on cot- 
tages, and the building of a new pumping sta- 
tion. The Huntington Memorial Building, a 
three story edifice with two wings and a front 
projection accentuating the front entrance, 
built of machine-made Indian-red bricks with 
red mortar, is a model of Twentieth Century 
school building design and construction. The 
ground space is 11,179 square feet, and the 
structure contains about 900,000 bricks. In the 
basement is an ample gymnasium for girls, and 
in the main centre of the third story an assem- 
bly hall seating 300 persons. Douglass Hall 
is a girls' dormitory with 33 bed rooms and a 
large study hall; and in style is an outgrowth 
of the colonial type. The Emery Dormitories 
represent the purely colonial type ; each building 
is of dark red brick and red mortar, and contains 
38 bed rooms and one sitting room. The Of- 
fice Building, built on Norman lines, contains 



100 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

the offices of the Principal, his Secretary, the 
Treasurer, the Auditor, the Business Agent, and 
also contains the Post Office, the Bank, etc. 
Finally all the excavation, lathing and plastering 
done on the grounds were done by the Masonry 
Division. 

The carpenters follow and work along with 
the brickmasons ; most of the wood work on the 
buildings mentioned, — and an immense amount 
it was, some of it very intricate, — and an in- 
finite number of other jobs have been done by the 
students in the division of Carpentry. A part 
of the lumber used by the carpenters, and all 
the laths used by the masons come directly from 
the division of Saw Millingo 

The roofs put on by the carpenters are cov- 
ered with tin by the students of the Tin-smith- 
ing division. Besides 105 coffee pots, 394 dip- 
pers, 423 dust pans, 446 slop pans, 763 buckets, 
and other tinware innumerable in kind and quan- 
tity, this division made 6,375 square feet of gut- 
ters and valleys. 

During the year the division of Electricity in- 
stalled one 7 kilowatt dynamo for street light- 
ing, removing the street lights from a large 
monocycle alternator to a small dynamo ; kept in 
operation in 27 buildings a total of 1,717 lights, 
and installed lights in Douglass Hall, Emery 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 101 

Dormitories Nos. 1 and 2 and the Academic 
Building. For this division the crowning 
achievement for the year was the installation of 
one 150 kilowatt dynamo. 

Even more significant is the year's work of 
the Machine and Engineering Division. Its 
foundry turned out 9 tons of sash weights for 
buildings, 11 tons of castings for machinery, 
stoves, boilers, agricultural implements, etc., be- 
sides the castings for 250 iron beds for the dorm- 
itories. The division filled an important order 
from the German government for castings for 
cotton-gin machinery. Moreover, the division 
repaired 40 pieces of machinery for other divi- 
sions, including metal-working, agricultural, 
and steam machinery. To increase the steam for 
heating the buildings, two new boilers were in- 
stalled. The Douglass Hall and Emery Dormi- 
tory No. 1, were fitted with steam heating 
system, cast iron radiators being used ; and also 
with water works service, such as lavatories, sani- 
tary closets, etc. The machine and engineering 
division installed with the aid of the brickmasons, 
a new water works system ; this plant is equipped 
with a new tower, and tank, a forty horse power 
boiler, and a duplex pump ; and has a capacity of 
10,000 gallons per hour. This plant furnishes 
the water needed by the live stock. During the 



102 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

month of April 637>739 gallons were pumped 
from the plant. The students made the installa- 
tions to which reference has been made in ac- 
cordance with drawings which had been made in 
the Mechanical Drawing Room. Almost daily 
13 steam, engines and 11 steam boilers were in 
operation and although student engineers and 
firemen were used exclusively not one serious 
mishap or wreck occurred during the year. 

You see that^ although I have purposely dealt 
with only a handful of Tuskegee's shops, I have 
nevertheless dealt with a large number of trades^ 
and that each student may learn and often 
does learn, more than one trade. The student in 
the masonry division regularly learns what in 
the North and in the urban South constitute 
two distinct trades — lathing and plastering, 
and brickmasonry. Similarly, engineering is 
distinct from tlie work of the machinist, and 
the machinist may be a " vise-hand " or a " ma- 
chine-tool " man ; finally, the steam fitter is dis- 
tinct from the other three. But at Tuskegee, 
the same boy attains moderate skill in the four 
trades. In addition to- these, moulding, casting 
and plumbing are taught in the MacHne and 
Engineering Division. The Tuskegee boy does 
not put all his eggs in one basket ; he is equipped 
for earning his living under the actual industrial 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 103 

conditions of the South. Tuskegee teaches the 
principles that underHe the trades and indus- 
tries, and she suppHes that abundant and costly 
practice which is after all the making of the 
workman. 

I despair of giving you any adequate impres- 
sion of the extent and significance of Tuskegee's 
farming operations ; however, a brief description 
of a horse-back ride over the farm may not be 
amiss. 

Even the car-window student of Southern life 
is familiar with the hang-dog aspect of what 
passes in the Black Belt of Alabama for a farm. 
Forty ill-kempt acres of sand, an old gray mule, 
stupid and lank and underfed; a rusty plow, 
heavy and 111 contrived ; an Illiterate Negro, reck- 
lessly good-natured, who knows no crop but cot- 
ton and scarce knows that, with a slatternly wife, 
lucky if robust, four or five meagerly clad, hun- 
gry-eyed children, and a yelping yellow dog, — 
these serve with too great justice as a sign and 
symbol of farming in the Black Belt. 

But, one August morning I went horse-back 
with the Superintendent of the Tuskegee Insti- 
tute Farm on his daily tour of Inspection. A 
keen faced, calculating man he is, spare but en- 
during; with clear eyes always looking, always 
seeing, always noting ; with an incisive high voice 



104^ FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

that means business ; with a mind whose thought 
is clear and quick and straight, well balanced 
with circumspection, well ballasted with fact; 
with the high geared energy of one who is up 
and doing betimes. No farmer this, — I 
thought; and I was right, and I was wrong. 

Merrily trotting down the road we went — I 
was merry, he was thinking — past the spacious 
Agricultural Building, with its flapping weather 
signals and its windows banked with flowers; 
past the Boys Trades Building, with its jaunty 
little pipes emitting streams of whitest vapor and 
its mighty smoke-stacks belching clouds of 
blackest smoke, with its various machinery dron- 
ing, buzzing, whirring, producing, teaching; 
past the Emery dormitories, — one completed by 
the disciplined heads and deft hands of student 
workmen, and the other growing right lustily, — 
out at last into the farm. 

To our right I remarked two great fields of 
sugar cane, green and waving. " A rather good 
crop," vouchsafed my guide. The crop repre- 
sented what energy and intelligence — the 
energy and intelligence of men of the same blood 
as that of the typical, illiterate, and improvident 
Negro farmer of the Black Belt, can do, are do- 
ing, have visibly achieved with land apparently 
done to death by ignorance and thriftlessness. 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 105 

" How many acres In your farm? " I ventured 
— ventured is the word, for the Superintendent 
was a bit uncommunicative with a view, perhaps, 
to letting me steer the conversation. " Includ- 
ing 1,600 acres of woodland, 2,500 — nearly 
all of it new land, that is to say, land recently 
acquired by the school, but old and worn out 
because hitherto regarded as a cotton mine.'^ 

In that crisp phrase, the average Black Belt 
farmer regards the unresisting soil frankly as a 
mine from which to extract indefinite nuggets 
of cotton stored beneath its surface. Accord- 
ing to Tuskegee doctrine enunciated by Mr. 
Washington on the Northern platform and 
(what is more to the point) according to Tuske- 
gee practice worked out on this farm — the soil 
is a laboratory in which, guided by scientific 
principles, alertness may with patient energy 
assemble the conditions necessary for divers 
bouncing crops. 

These ideas were re-enforced by what we saw 
at the Truck Farm, into which we now turned 
our eager horses. 

Here we met the manager whose name, being 
Brown, It were hopelessly ambiguous to men- 
tion. He is a Tuskegee graduate or more ex- 
actly, a former student of the school whose pow- 
ers in the academic studies did not balance his 



106 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

abilities in the industrial. But, last year the 
Principal decided that by capable management 
of this beautiful garden, the man had quite 
atoned for his literary turpitude ; and the Prin- 
cipal was certainly just in this matter, just and 
sagacious. The steady control of the wary cab- 
bage ; the shameless, self-assertive onion ; the too 
modest tomato; and the frolicsome watermelon 
is incalculably a finer art than the mere knack of 
using with monotonous accuracy the identical 
case behind the back as before the face of the 
verb to be. 

This truck farm, great though its product 
be, — and its product, including this season 
5,000 bushels of sweet potatoes and 26,000 dozen 
onions, is prodigious, — is no mere productive 
enterprise; or better, its products are in part 
material and in part spiritual, for fundamentally 
it is a school room. Here a great many boys 
and a few girls learn the essentials of gardening 
and some of the more delicate tricks of that en- 
grossing art. How miserable, stale, flat, and 
unprofitable is the teaching of apologetic nature 
study in certain classrooms of the North with 
unpalatable text-book, blackboard, diagram, and 
semi-occasional specimen carefully dried and 
irretrievably dead, as contrasted with the way in 
which this man, Brown, — whole-hearted zest 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 107 

serving for apology — teaches gardening by 
gardening out in the open air in the sunlight 
under the sky. 

After scrutinizing the work of the groups of 
student gardeners and giving Brown some 
orders that were more than Greek to me, my 
companion reined up his horse from nibbling a 
delicious stalk of corn, and with a wave of the 
hand to me, started off. 

Up the road we went at a brisk trot. This 
road, by the way, is a county institution which 
the school at its own expense has put in excellent 
trim, because the road runs for a least a mile 
through the centre of this section of the farm. 
On both sides have been planted trees ; and in a 
few years when the trees have grown high 
enough to afford a grateful shade, to drive down 
that road will be a delight. 

To our right was a great field of corn sweep- 
ing from one end to the other of this division 
of the farm. Much of the crop was to be used 
for ensilage ; later we passed the three capacious 
silos in which the corn was to be stored to sweeten 
until winter. This year corn and the enriching 
cowpea will probably be planted together, the 
stalks of corn giving the pea vines enough back- 
bone to permit their passing through the cutting 
machine, preparatory to being stored, without 



108 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

being tangled and crushed. Though technically 
not so successful as the management had hoped, 
that field of corn, — the utilities aside, — was a 
magnificent spectacle as it waved and tossed in 
sunlight and glistened and dimpled and gleamed. 

To the left the Superintendent pointed out 
herds of cattle grazing in fenced lots on the 
stubble of an oat crop as vast as the com. The 
school owns 160 milch cows, 64 calves, 94^ year- 
lings and two year olds, and 8 frowning bulls, — 
every one vigorous, sleek, and fine ; and in addi- 
tion 235 beef cattle which are being fattened to 
sustain hungry boys and girls in their life and 
labor. The grazing herds consisted of thor- 
ough-bred Shorthorns introduced from Pennsyl- 
vania; Guernseys, from New York; Jerseys, 
both thoroughbred and grade ; a few Holsteins ; 
and an infusion of Devon, Durham, and Ayr- 
shire blood. 

After traversing this section of the farm, my 
companion and I, — the 11 o'clock bell to quit 
work for the morning had just rung, — hastened 
to the other section by a well graded road over 
school land. 

Here on both sides of the road were great, 
generous plots of sweet potatoes. Down the 
hill to our right we caught a glimpse of the relics 
of a strawberry patch, whose sweets I had been 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 109 

privileged to taste one Spring. Beyond the 
ghostly abode of the strawberries, my eyes 
feasted on the glorious orchard with its pear 
trees, its plum trees, and overtopping all in 
my secret thought, its 6,000 peach trees, many 
of which were deliciously fruiting. 

Down the sweeping circle of the broad road 
we went at a fox-trot past a little vineyard of 
luscious Catawbas and Concords, and then up 
the steep hill at whose top many an unpremedi- 
tated squeal announced in no uncertain terms 
the aromatic presence of some 700 hogs. Hogs 
and filth, my previous experience in the Black 
Belt had instructed me, are chemical affinities: 
and, therefore, imagine my dehghi; to see the 
rows of little white sheds — the residences of the 
squealers — all clean and white and well ordered ! 
Next came the bams with their 125 horses and 
mules, including two royal stallions, 14 silly 
prancing colts, and one Spanish jackass rapt in 
speculation. 

The milk-white cow barns came next. In 
illustration of the comprehensive system which 
keeps this great farm, like some huge factory, 
always at the topnotch of efficiency, my guide 
here explained to me the method adopted for 
feeding the milch herd. " The cows," said he, 
" are known by their fruits, that is, fed accord- 



110 FROM SEflVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Ing to milk flow," In front of each stall, — 
above which the name of the cow, whether scrip- 
tural Delilah or secular Nellie, has been neatly 
inscribed by some student sign painter, — hangs 
a neat billet with a number on it, '* 1 '^ or " 3 " 
or " 5," to indicate the ration to be fed. No. 1 
says that the cow's milk flow is over two gallons 
a day, and No. 5 that it is less than three-fourths 
of a gallon. Cow No. 1 receives the reward of 
5 pounds of cotton seed meal with bran and 
green com to match; cow No. 5 is thriftily al- 
lowed to go dry. The nutritive ratio, — that 
is, the ratio of the flesh-forming nutrients to all 
the others, — of the current daily ration was 
1 :54, that prescribed by Prof. Bailey of Cornell 
being 1 :57. Thus, not a penny's worth of corn 
or meal or bran is wasted. A system every whit 
as precise stands guard over every section and 
every process of the Tuskegee Farm. 

Next came the cleanest dairy in the South, 
where Gordon — truck-farm Brown's classmate 
and analogue — compounds an odorless Cheddar 
that tastes famously well and as excellent cream 
cheese as ever refreshed wearied traveller in 
Neufchatel-en-Bray. And last we galloped by 
the enormous poultry yards swarming with 
chickens and turkeys and ducks; and the little 
house where the incubators travail, marked the 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 111 

end of that memorable trip around the farm. 

Agriculture is of course the fundamental in- 
dustry, — 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 that each year 
sweeps thousands of black men and women and 
children from the sunlit monotony of the planta- 
tion to the sunless iniquity of the slum, from a 
drudgery that is not quite cheerless to a competi- 
tion that is altogether merciless. But, the teach- 
ing of agriculture even in its elementary stages 
presupposes a considerable amount of academic 
preparation. How can chemical fertilizers be 
carefully analyzed by a boy who has made no 
study of general chemistry? — how can a bal- 
anced ration be adjusted by an illiterate? Sim- 
ilarly, the girl in the laundry does not make 
soap by rote but by principle: and the girl in 
the dress-making shop does not cut her pattern 
by luck or guess or instinct or rule of thumb. 
And so the successful teaching of the industries 
demands no mean amount of academic prepara- 
tion. 

Industrial training of the Tuskegee type un- 
mistakably develops character, vigorous and sub- 
stantial. However valid and imperative the eco- 
nomic considerations that sustain this training, 



112 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

I do not hesitate to say — and in doing so, I 
merely echo the appeals of Armstrong and 
Washington — that the moral considerations 
loom larger. To ingrain in the child of the 
plantation the habit of regular labor, to endow 
him with a keen sense of responsibihty, to invest 
him with a reasonable confidence in his own power 
to bring things to pass, — to do these things is 
incalculably more important than to train that 
child to any particular form of technical skill. 
The education is no mere by-product of the 
training. 

Alongside and in closest correlation to the in- 
dustries of Tuskegee, are the academic studies 
extending from the third to ninth grades, inclu- 
sive. Education is for life and " a man's life 
consisteth not in the abundance of things that 
he possesseth.'' Through history and English 
literature, the Tuskegee student is brought to 
develop an appreciation of life and the worthier 
ends of human striving. Then too, wood and 
iron evoke no enthusiasm for serving one's fel- 
lows and one's community; a material infinitely 
more subtle and delicate must be used. But, it 
is precisely this spirit of social service that Tus- 
kegee must arouse in all her students if she 
would attain her greatest usefulness. And so 
the school is glad to utilize the incentives sup- 



TUSKEGEE UNIVERSITY 113 

plied by history and literature. And lastly, the 
mission of Tuskegee Institute is largely to sup- 
ply measurably well equipped teachers to the 
schools — teachers able and eager to teach gar- 
dening and carpentry as well as grammar and 
arithmetic, teachers who seek to organize the 
social life of their communities on wholesome 
principles, tactfully restraining grossness and 
unobtrusively proffering new and nobler sources 
of enjoyment. 

The crude, stumbling, sightless, plantation 
boy who lives in the environment of Tuskegee 
for three or four years, departs at last with an 
alertness, a resourcefulness, and above all a spirit 
of service that announce the educated man. 

Howard and Fisk and Atlanta and Berea, 
Hampton and Tuskegee, — every one except 
Tuskegee has been built up and is administered 
by white men: Tuskegee alone is the fruit of a 
black man's heart and brain and effort and ad- 
ministrative skill. Tuskegee Institute is at 
once a powerful instrument for the uplift of 
black men and an irrefragable proof of the black 
man's capacity for the tasks of civilization. 



IV 

HAMPTON INSTITUTE 

BY 

PEINCIPAL H. B. FRISSELIi 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 

More of historic interest centers about the 
lower end of the Virginia Peninsula than about 
any other spot in this country. Here are 
Jamestown and Williamsburg and Yorktown. 
Here are Fortress Monroe, Old Point Comfort, 
Newport News, and Hampton Roads. Between 
Capes Charles and Henry came the ship that 
bore the first English colonists; still later en- 
tered another craft bearing a cargo of black 
humanity ; and again, centuries afterward, there 
steamed through these same Capes that strange 
looking vessel, the Monitor, with its antagonist, 
the armor-plated Merrimac, which revolutionized 
all naval warfare. 

On this peninsula John Smith worked out a 
system of industrial training for whites that 
made Colonial life possible, insisting that in the 
Jamestown Colony, unless a man would work, 
neither should he eat. Here, many years later. 
General Armstrong, as one has said, " recognized 
and utilized the economic and moral value of in- 
dustrial processes, making clear to the people 
of this country and to the world that no educa- 
117 



118 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

tional system is complete for white, black, or 
red, which does not train the hand to work." 
Here he demonstrated the special value in the 
uplift of the Negro and the Indian of com- 
bining the training of the head, the hand, and 
the heart. At Jamestown began the expansion 
of England " from five million to five hundred 
and fifty million," made possible largely 
through the efforts of John Smith, as Mr. Fiske 
clearly shows in his " Old Virginia and Her 
Neighbors." 

At Hampton, near by, where the Negro was 
first made " contraband of war," began the real 
emancipation of the black race through a system 
of education which transformed the labor of 
the hand from stupid drudgery into an intellec- 
tual process. Hither came also the children of 
the red man to learn the same system and to 
carry to the West a scheme of education that 
has been adopted in hundreds of Government 
industrial schools for Indians for which the 
United States now appropriates hundreds of 
thousands of dollars. 

Hampton was the first of the great schools 
started by Northern philanthropy and estab- 
lished at the points where the great battles of 
the war were fought, extending from Virginia 
to Texas. These schools carried on the work of 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 119 

emancipation and sent out young soldiers to 
make a long fight against ignorance, shiftless- 
ness, and vice. On the very spot where hun- 
dreds of white and black soldiers had died, in 
the old barracks of the Hampton Hospital, 
which was filled with wounded Union soldiers 
brought in after the battles fought on the Penin- 
sula ; on grounds surrounding the great National 
Cemetery where sleep, side by side, the boys in 
blue and the boys in gray; on the site of the 
old Indian village in which the Kecoughtans 
welcomed the first white settlers; and not far 
from the old church where the first recorded bap- 
tisms were those of a Negro child and an Indian 
youth, has grown up this great industrial school 
that has had so important a part in the uplift 
of the black and red races of our land, and 
whose influence is being felt in the educational 
work of the islands of the sea and in the dark 
continent of Africa. 

Not only is the Virginia Peninsula an inter- 
esting spot historically. It is also a point of 
strategic value. Its commanding position was 
recognized by the early colonists, and by the 
generals of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. 
General Armstrong, as he lay wounded in the 
hospital barracks, recognized the importance of 
this situation in the educational work of the 



120 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

country. Midway between the North and 
South, not far from the nation's capital, in the 
midst of a large Negro population, in the old 
State of Virginia, which has held such an im- 
portant place in great national movements, he 
realized that here was a most satisfactory spot 
in which to demonstrate to both whites and blacks 
the possibilities of the Negro race under a sys- 
tem of practical education. He felt that if the 
blacks were to be raised it must be through co- 
operation with the Southern whites. No better 
place than Hampton could be found for uniting 
the white, black, and red races, the North and 
the South, and Federal and State governments 
in an effort toward better things. Being near 
Washington, it can easily be used as an object 
lesson for the lawmakers from different parts 
of the country in the educational possibilities of 
two races. On one occasion when a company 
of these lawmakers were spending the Sabbath 
in the town of Hampton, they visited the school, 
and one of the speakers, a Representative from 
Texas, in his address to the students expressed 
in true Western style his appreciation of this ob- 
ject lesson. "We read in the Bible," said he, 
^' that it is right to pull out an ox or an ass from 
a ditch on the Sabbath day and I suppose that 
is what Hampton is doing for us." 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 121 

On account of Its proximity to Old Point 
Comfort it is not unusual for the Hampton 
School to be visited by two or three hundred 
Northern tourists In a single day. " Are you 
civilized? " said a visitor to an intelligent Indian 
girl from a Western reservation. " Yes, are 
you? " was the answer. " Can you speak Eng- 
lish? " continued the interested visitor. " That 
which I am speaking to you is English," said 
the girl, with freezing politeness. Hampton is 
also easy of access to the South. Thousands 
of people from the interior of the Southern 
States seek each summer the shores of the Chesa- 
peake, and most of them visit the Hampton 
School. Some of you have read, perhaps, that 
terrible book, " The Negro a Beast," written by 
a former slave owner. As a Southern man said 
to me, " The dreadful thing about that book 
is that the man who wrote it believed it." It 
is of the greatest importance that the Southern 
man should realize that the Negro is something 
more than a beast of burden. As he has watched 
the Negro in the Hampton shops, working out 
difficult problems in wood and iron, as he has 
seen him on the land successfully tilling the soil, 
as he has followed him to the schoolroom and 
listened to his intelligent recitations, as he has 
observed his courteous, self-respecting bearing, 



122 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

the Southerner has come to believe that the Ne- 
gro has a head and heart as well as a body. 
Occasionally a Southern visitor has sworn at the 
Hampton students, as a man once did on leav- 
ing, when the Negro guide who had intelligently 
shown him through the grounds refused the tip 
that was thrown to him; but more frequently 
the Southerner has gone away converted to a 
belief in the possibilities of Negro education. 
Thousands of black men and women from all 
parts of the country have come to Hampton and 
have helped their people to overcome the strong 
aversion to industrial training which they had 
for many years, and which caused them to call 
the Hampton School a " slave pen " and a " lit- 
erary penitentiary." At the Hampton summer 
school hundreds of Negro teachers from all parts 
of the South have spent from four to six weeks 
obtaining instruction which enabled them on 
their return to introduce sewing, cooking, agri- 
culture, and woodworking into their schools. 
Companies of Indian chiefs visiting Washington 
have come to this cradle of Indian industrial 
education and have been led to believe that the 
white man's teaching was of value to the Indian 
brave. 

Hampton Anniversaries have for years been 
important national educational gatherings where 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 123 

the governors of Southern States have helped 
Southern and Northern clergymen and laymen 
to understand some of the difficulties of South- 
ern conditions. Largely through the instru- 
mentality of Hampton's Board of Trustees and 
its efficient President, Mr. Robert C. Ogden, the 
Southern Educational Conferences have been es- 
tablished and held in every part of the South. 
At these meetings, bishops, presidents of col- 
leges, senators, state superintendents of educa- 
tion, and prominent business men have met to 
discuss the greatest question which the South 
has to solve — how to give every child an educa- 
tion which shall fit him or her to perform in- 
telligently the duties of life. A prominent 
Northern educator said at the meeting of the 
National Educational Association in Boston that 
these conferences represent the most important 
educational movement of our time. Through 
the same instrumentality has grown up the 
Southern Education Board, which is standing 
behind the strong, fine men of the South who 
are demanding the education of all the people, 
and whose Secretary, Mr. Edgar Gardner Mur- 
phy, a Southern man, has written a book, " The 
Present South," confessedly the most statesman- 
like utterance which has appeared on the South- 
ern question. Another outgrowth of these con- 



IM FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

ferences is the General Education Board whose 
Secretary, Dr. Wallace Buttrick, is making the 
most careful scientific study of Southern educa- 
tional conditions that this country has ever 
known. At the Hampton Summer Conference 
gather each year the best representatives of the 
Negro race to discuss economic, business, sani- 
tary, religious, and educational questions affect- 
ing their people and to make plans for their im- 
provement. Even from Asiatic and European 
countries and from Hawaii, the Philippines, 
Porto Rico, the West Indies, and South Africa 
come men and women of all races and national- 
ities to study Hampton methods of industrial 
education. A member of the Moseley Commis- 
sion said that he found Hampton the most inter- 
esting educational institution in this country. 
General Armstrong was right in thinking that 
Hampton was an important strategic point. 

Not only is Hampton fortunate in the stra- 
tegic value of its position, but perhaps even more 
so in the very varied character of the people who 
have served it in various capacities. General 
Armstrong brought to it volcanic fire from the 
Sandwich Islands. He was full of enthusiasm 
and force, thought and devotion, bristling with 
ideas gained in the islands of the Pacific, at 
Williamstown, and in the army. General and 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 125 

Mrs. Marshall, that charming couple led to 
Hampton by their love for the young Sunday 
school boy, Samuel Armstrong, whom General 
Marshall had helped to train in the Sandwich 
Islands, made an indelible mark upon the school's 
life. Into it has gone also the wholesome influ- 
ence of Albert Howe, that cheery soldier from 
Dorchester, whom General Armstrong enlisted, 
and under whose direction almost every building 
on the school grounds has been erected. The 
Woolsey family, the Bellows, the Beechers, the 
Bacons, the Briggses, the Ludlows, the Gillettes, 
the Hardings, the Richards — all have helped 
to make life possible to these children of the 
black and red races. Here Mary Mackie and 
her sister Charlotte, with their Scotch-Irish 
force and grit, taught that black boy, Booker 
Washington, from the mines of West Virginia, 
the dignity of labor, working with their own 
hands alongside of him, recognizing and de- 
veloping the power that was in him. Here 
Elizabeth Hyde, the niece of the long-time head 
of Framingham has moulded and directed the 
thought and character of hundreds of Indian 
and Negro youth. Dr. Waldron, sitting by the 
bedsides of the sick, caring for the dying, has 
served these children for more than a quarter 
of a century. Smith and Wellesley and Bryn 



126 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Mawr and Vassar and Williams and Amherst 
and Yale and Columbia and Boston University 
have sent of their best to make Hampton pos- 
sible. Leaving a position of great trust and 
responsibility where he was assured of business 
success, the present treasurer, Mr. Purves, ^ son- 
in-law of Mr. R. C. Ogden, labors for the school's 
good, and Rev. Mr. Turner, the chaplain, by his 
Christian life and his words of love leads the 
black and red youth to follow the Master, 
Alongside of these men and women have labored 
devoted Southern white men, having under their 
care some of the most important industries of 
the school. Here Booker Washington taught, 
and Annie Dawson, the Indian girl. Here 
Major Moton and Captain Washington and 
Messrs. Banks and Barrett and Daggs and 
Davis have kept the thought and feeling of the 
student and graduate body loyal to the ideals 
of its founder. 

If one were to ask the secret of Hampton's 
success we would say it is to be found in the 
fact that the country has given her its best. 
Dr. Mark Hopkins was one of its first trustees. 
Dr. Strieby, Dr. Whipple, Dr. Hitchcock, and 
Mr. Elbert B. Monroe pleaded and labored for 

iMr. Purves died March 30, 1905. 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 127 

It. Phillips Brooks, Henry Foote, John G. 
Whittier, and Mrs. Hemenway were its devoted 
friends, and to-day hundreds of men and women 
are saving and denying themselves in order to 
share their inheritance with these disinherited 
races. Mr. Ogden, the Peabodys, Dr. McKenzie 
of Cambridge, Bishop McVickar of Rhode Is- 
land, and others of the most efficient board of 
trustees in this country are giving of their time 
and thought to make the school effective. Dr. 
Peabody of Cambridge is accustomed to say that 
" at Hampton one meets the aristocracy of three 
races, the white, the black, and the red." Here 
Boston's first citizen, Edward Everett Hale, is 
accustomed to spend some weeks of his year. 
Carl Schurz and his family spent three weeks of 
last year on the school grounds. Hon. Dr. 
Curry, that Southern apostle of education for 
the common man, was wont to come often to 
Hampton. The question is sometimes asked 
why Hampton is not, like Tuskegee, placed 
under the care of colored men. Because, im- 
portant as is the work of black for black, the 
colored man needs also, now more than ever, con- 
tact with the best thought and life of the white 
race. Booker Washington Is a spiritual de- 
scendent of General Armstrong, and no man Is 
quicker than he to acknowledge how much his 



128 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

contact with Anglo-Saxon thought has done for 
him. He has often acknowledged, too, the in- 
fluence of the Indian and the value to him of 
a knowledge of the wrongs and difficulties of the 
red race. 

But we must hasten on to discuss more fully 
the problems that Hampton has to meet, her 
methods in meeting those problems, and the re- 
sults of her work. General Armstrong in his 
Hawaiian home not only recognized the diffi- 
culties of the natives, but also came to under- 
stand how tremendous was the task of those who 
were trying to uplift them. It was as an agent 
of the Freedman's Bureau that he first came to 
the Virginia Peninsula. His duty was to adjust 
the affairs of whites and blacks, and the problem 
which he presented to himself in the founding 
of the Hampton School also concerned not one 
race but two. The question was not merely 
how the black race could be uplifted, but how 
it could be helped to meet the conditions in which 
it found itself and how its members could learn 
to be of service to the communities in which they 
lived. We used to hear much in our educational 
literature of how to make an ideal man, men- 
tally, morally, and spiritually, with little or no 
regard to his environment. The relation of edu- 
cation and vocation is more and more considered 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 129 

because the ideal man can be produced only as 
he learns to adapt himself to his environment. 
General Armstrong came to a realizing sense of 
this fact as he worked among the crowds of 
Negroes who had come from Virginia and North 
Carolina to put themselves under the protection 
of the guns of Fortress Monroe. They were 
huddled together, living upon government ra- 
tions, a motley, improvident mass. The first 
question which presented itself was as to how 
these people could be mad-e self-supporting, for 
he felt, as did John Smith, that they could 
make but little progress until they worked for 
their daily bread. Hundreds of them he sent 
North, others he settled upon the land, and still 
others were placed at service among the white 
planters of the Peninsula. Second, he endeav- 
ored to provide houses for them, for he realized 
that there could be no morality as long as fa- 
thers, mothers, children, dogs, and strangers 
huddled together in the one-room cabins. Third, 
he provided schools and churches, for he thor- 
oughly appreciated the necessity of academic 
and religious training. But to him from the 
first, education did not mean merely a knowl- 
edge of books. To him, education was life. 
He believed in making the whole of life an edu- 
cation. When, later, he was called by the 



130 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

American Missionary Association to take charge 
of the Hampton School, his aim was " to train 
selected * * * youth who should go out 
and teach and lead their people, first by exam- 
ple by getting land and homes; to give them 
not a dollar that they could earn for themselves ; 
to teach respect for labor; to replace stupid 
drudgery with skilled hands ; and, to these ends, 
to build up an industrial system, for the sake 
not only of self-support and intelligent labor, 
but also for the sake of character." He realized 
that the great mass of the blacks lived upon the 
land. He knew that they could obtain what was 
impossible to European peasants, land and homes 
of their own. He knew that more than eighty 
per cent of the population of the South lived 
in the country and that intelligent methods of 
agriculture were most needed. He knew that 
the young teacher in the rural school, or the 
Negro preacher could be of immense value if 
only he could instruct his community in proper 
ways of farming, so the farm became an im- 
portant factor in the educational process at 
Hampton. As the school grew, trained teachers 
of agriculture were secured, laboratories and 
school gardens were added, agricultural leaflets 
were issued. Evey student in the school was 
given a fair knowledge of plants, animals, and 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 131 

soils. Dairying was Introduced, poultry raising 
was taught. Large herds of cattle were secured. 
An experiment station was added where experi- 
ments were made in rotation of crops, various 
fertilizers, drainage, and inoculation of the 
soil. A small model farm and barn gave an 
opportunity to show how intensive methods of 
agriculture could be introduced. Large green- 
houses were built, and roses and carnations raised 
for the market. 

It became evident before many years of free- 
dom had come to the blacks that they were los- 
ing the trades that they had monopolized in 
slavery. The old plantations were, many of 
them, trade schools where the youth of the Negro 
race were trained. It seemed necessary to make 
some provision for trade teaching. Shops were 
opened for blacksmlthing and wheelwrighting, 
carpentry and bricklaying, tinsmlthing and 
painting, shoe and harness making. A large 
trade school was provided and at its head was 
placed a graduate of the Worcester School of 
Technology, who had practical knowledge of 
manufacturing, had acted as supervisor of man- 
ual training in St. Paul, and had carefully 
studied the educational side of trade work. 
Hundreds of carefully trained mechanics and 
teachers of trades have been sent out, more than 



132 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

sixty-five per cent of whom have practiced or 
taught the trades they have learned. 

General Armstrong felt the necessity of pro- 
viding homes for his blacks on the Virginia 
Peninsula, so he made it a part of his plan that 
those who were to go out as teachers and lead- 
ers should help the people to obtain decent 
homes. While a few of the house servants, 
through contact with their mistresses before the 
•war, had a knowledge of what a real home should 
be, the great mass of Negro slave women had no 
conception of the meaning of the word. To 
give them that conception and to fit them to 
perform the duties of mothers and home mak- 
ers became one of the important objects of the 
Hampton School. A building for the teaching 
of domestic science was erected. Every girl was 
taught sewing, cooking, the care of the dining- 
room and bedroom, weaving, basketry, laundry 
work, garden making, and the care of poultry, 
but these were taught in such a way that they 
should be an integral part of their education. 
To illustrate : The Hampton laundry is one of 
the most important educational departments of 
the institution. Carefully trained teachers are 
placed in charge of the work. It is one of the 
most interesting places on the school grounds. 
Many of the girls spend their first year there. 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 133 

The work of washing and ironing clothes has 
been changed from dull routine to an interesting 
series of lessons. They pass from one part of 
the work to another so as to gain a thorough 
knowledge of the whole. When the day's work 
is over they go to the laboratory where they 
learn by actual experiment how soap and blue- 
ing are made; they study textiles; under the 
microscope they watch the effect of hot and cold 
water upon woolen cloth. They pass to the 
classroom and their first study of English has 
to do with the work of the day and their experi- 
ments in the laboratory. They write about the 
things that they have known and done. The 
result is that their language is simple and exact. 
Their words have experiences behind them. 
When they go to the arithmetic class, their prob- 
lems also have to do with the work of the day. 
They are learning how much soap and starch 
are needed in the washing of a certain number of 
clothes. So their daily work is dignified by be- 
ing made a most important part of their edu- 
cation. 

Religion and education have had in the case 
of both whites and blacks too little to do 
with daily life. For long years education was 
not supposed to be within the reach of the man 
who had to labor with his hands. Now we are 



134 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

beginning to understand that the best education 
is not possible to the man who can and does not 
labor with his hands; and that any kind of 
manual labor is a most important part of edu- 
cation. A new fireproof kitchen with complete 
equipment has just been finished at Hamipton 
and is helping the students to realize some of 
the possibilities connected with the preparation 
of food. We have in the South, as in many 
other parts of the country, poorly fed land, 
poorly fed crops, poorly fed animals, poorly fed 
men and women. The improvement of land, 
crops, animals, and men and women must go on 
together and it is to this improvement that 
Hampton is devoting itself. Boys and girls are 
gaining some little knowledge of what the body 
needs for its proper nourishment, and each year 
greater interest is shown in cooking and the 
preparation of food. The spring time finds 
companies of boys and girls devoting themselves 
to their gardens; later they are instructed in 
the preparation for food of the vegetables that 
they have raised. The superintendent of schools 
in one of our large cities recently said to me 
that his system of instruction was superficial be- 
cause, living in a great city, his pupils grew up 
in ignorance of the groundwork of an educa- 
tion — a knowledge of plants, animals, and 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 135 

soils. This groundwork is provided at Hamp- 
ton, and English literature means all the more 
to the students because it often has to do with 
objects in nature that they come to know and 
love. 

But while Hampton gives great prominence 
to the work of the hand, while it realizes that 
the power of self-support is in itself most edu- 
cational, while it believes with President Eliot 
that content in work, enthusiasm for the daily 
task, is the only solution for some of the greatest 
difficulties which this country has to meet, while 
it lays stress on preparation for home life and 
realizes that unless we can brighten and purify 
the source of life, the home, the best things are 
impossible, yet it by no means underrates the 
value of academic or religious training. It is 
necessary, in order to produce young men pos- 
sessed of industrial initiative such as shall enable 
them to lead their people, that along with indus- 
trial training they be given sufficient knowledge 
of history to enable them to understand their 
people's position in the world ; sufficient acquaint- 
ance with geography to help them to discover 
the natural resources of their State and their 
community ; a practical knowledge of chemistry 
and physics and some training in mathematics 
so that they may understand the laws of nature. 



136 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

No people was ever more interested in race prob- 
lems than are the Negroes. It is essential that 
they know the laws under which they are to live 
and therefore thorough training in civil govern- 
ment is important. Economics, too, is essential. 
A careful study has been made by the Senior 
class the past year of the recently published 
special census report on the Negro. 

As has already been intimated, careful corre- 
lation is made between the agricultural, me- 
chanical, and home making departments and the 
school's academic work. Instead of using the 
ordinary school arithmetic, problems are taken 
from every-day transactions at the barn, the 
commissary, the kitchen, the laundry, the car- 
penter shop, the printing office, and the store. 
The Hampton School is really an industrial vil- 
lage with mill, workshops, homes, church, stores, 
barns, where is carried on a large business with 
the outside world, amounting to thousands of 
dollars. The sort of education described in Pro- 
fessor Dewey's " School and Society," which 
centers in the life and work of the community, 
goes on at Hampton to an extent unknown any- 
where else in this country. Far-ojBF South 
America and South Africa are made real to the 
students by the plows and wheelbarrows that 
they make and ship to these countries. Through 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 137 

its exports and Its imports, through its manu- 
factured articles and its farm products, through 
its barns and dairies and greenhouses, through its 
steam and water plant, and its complicated ma- 
chinery, these young people are introduced to 
life, not merely as it is portrayed in books but 
as it really is in the great world outside of the 
school. Dr. Albert Shaw gave the title " Learn- 
ing by Doing" to an account which he wrote 
of the Hampton School, and declared that for 
$10,000 a year he could not secure for liis boy 
in New York City a training so valuable as that 
given free of charge to the children of Hamp- 
ton's Whittier training school. 

A very important part of Hampton's training 
is that given in the study of the Bible. David 
and Moses and the other Biblical characters are 
much more real to the colored people than even 
Lincoln or Washington. To weave these char- 
acters into a continuous history and to unite 
the scattered fragments of Biblical knowledge 
that we find in our students' minds into a con- 
nected whole is a most interesting and helpful 
work. To lead them out from the erroneous 
and one-sided interpretations of Scripture which 
tradition has brought down to them, into a ra- 
tional understanding of God's Word is a rare 
privilege. The story of the Exodus, the wan- 



138 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

dering in the Wilderness, the entrance into the 
Promised Land, probably never meant as much 
to any people except the Jews as they do to the 
Negroes. They study with eager interest the 
story of the growth and development of the Jew- 
ish people from barbarism into high intellectual 
and spiritual life, and learn to realize, as they 
could not in any other way, some of the proc- 
esses through which their own people must pass. 
The poetic parts of the Bible they keenly enjoy, 
with an appreciation of the Oriental imagery 
which is perhaps not possible to us of the Anglo- 
Saxon race. A series of questions in regard to 
the Scriptural allusions in Shakespeare brought 
twenty per cent more of correct answers from 
Hampton's Senior class than from the same class 
in a leading college for young men in the North, 
and from a corresponding one in a young 
women's college. An attempt is made to har- 
ness the emotional religious life of the students 
to real tasks and duties. Kindliness in word 
and deed is absolutely insisted upon at Hamp- 
ton among both teachers and students. " Can- 
tankerousness is worse than heterodoxy," said 
General Armstrong. Hate, racial or individual, 
is excluded. Mr. Washington's statement in 
his Atlanta speech : " No man, white or black, 
from North or South, shall drag me down so 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 139 

low as to make me hate him,'' fairly represents 
the thought of the Hampton student. We 
sometimes think of race prejudice as belonging 
to the whites alone. It is quite as much a char- 
acteristic of the black and red races. " What 
did you think of white people before you came 
to Hampton ? " said a teacher to an Indian boy. 
" I thought they were devils,'' was the answer. 
The mother of one of our students, when told 
that he was instructed in religious truth by a 
white teacher, expressed her dissatisfaction by 
saying, " White folks' religion ain't no 'count 
no how." But at Hampton race prejudice finds 
no encouragement. One of the highest compli- 
ments ever paid the school was that given by 
Dr. Curry when he said that as an agency for 
allaying race prejudice he considered Hampton 
the most important factor In the South. Closely 
related with the minimizing of race prejudice 
is the Inculcation In the minds of the students 
of a belief In. their own people and a respect for 
their own race. The folk-lore songs of the 
Indians and Negroes are cultivated at Hampton 
as In no other spot In this country. The mili- 
tary system of the school demands Implicit obe- 
dience to ofBcers of their own race. In the 
teaching of history the stories of their own peo- 
ple have a prominent place. " Up from Sla- 



140 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

very " is one of their English text-books. In 
all possible ways a kindly feeling toward the 
white race and belief in their own are inculcated. 

The great central thought of Hampton has 
always been that what is obtained of agricul- 
tural, mechanical, scientific, or academic knowl- 
edge is to be used in the service of others. To 
this end every boy and girl is trained to teach 
or to be of service to the community in other 
ways. The jail, the poorhouse, the old log cab- 
ins, the Sunday schools, the churches of the 
neighborhood are called into requisition to fit 
these young people to labor for others. Every 
Sunday, squads of boys and girls may be seen 
manning boats, harnessing teams, or starting out 
on foot to care for the young and old of the 
Negro race in the vicinity — reading and sing- 
ing to the old and blind; teaching the children 
in Sunday schools; on week days mending the 
log cabins or preparing and planting gardens. 

The students are not only taught in this way 
to be of service to the poor and needy but they 
are also given instruction in methods of teaching 
in the classroom. At the Whittier School, 
named after him who sang of love and service, 
may be found four or five hundred children of 
the neighborhood. Here are kindergarten, cook- 
ing, sewing, basketry, and woodworking classes, 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 141 

and the largest school garden in the world. 
This primary school serves as a practice school 
for the normal department. Here is given a 
knowledge of the great art of teaching, a real 
acquaintance with children, and, in the case of 
most, a real love for them. It is not expected 
that every boy and girl who leaves Hampton 
shall teach in the schoolroom, whether academic 
subjects or manual training, but it is expected 
that every one shall have acquired the central 
thought of service to others and shall have 
gained a knowledge of the principles and prac- 
tice of teaching. To aid in this work there have 
come to us the past year Mr. Phenix, the suc- 
cessful head of the State Normal School at Wil- 
limantic, Connecticut, and Miss Walter, whose 
long years of service at Oswego and later at 
Willimantic and Hyannis have fitted her, as few 
women are fitted, to impart the best methods of 
normal work. 

No graduate of Hampton becomes a drag on 
the community to which he goes. Nearly thir- 
teen hundred graduates and over five thousand 
ex-students have been sent out since the school 
was founded. Eighty-seven per cent of the 
school's living graduates are known to be profit- 
ably employed. Many are leaders in business 
enterprises; 35 per cent are farmers, tradesmen, 



142 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

or part time farmers ; and a very large number 
are teachers of industries. 

But you need concrete examples to help you to 
understand the work of Hampton graduates and 
ex-students. In 1881 there appeared at Hamp- 
ton a most unusual student — a bronze- faced 
man of thirty with his little son and nephew and 
three other children. He knew but little English, 
the others none at all. This man was Antonito 
Azul, son of the chief of the Pim_a Indians, who, 
desiring to improve the condition of his people, 
had come East with the leading young people 
of his tribe in order to learn how to do it. He 
himself entered both school and shop as a pupil, 
working earnestly for a year and a half, not 
only in the departments of the school but in the 
community. He then returned home, taking 
with him specimens of work to interest his peo- 
ple, and plans by which he hoped to bring about 
many improvements. One of his first public acts 
was to stamp the seal of his disapproval upon 
polygamy, by honorably divorcing one of his 
two wives and settling her comfortably in her 
own home. To replace the rude hut of his ear- 
lier days he built himself an adobe house, and 
began improvements on his land, setting his 
neighbors an example of industry, thrift, and 
enterprise. The following words show the esti- 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 143 

mation in which Antonito was held by the veteran 
army officer. Gen. O. O. Howard: — 

" In bearing, in a steady purpose to do right 
from which he was seldom known to deviate, in 
courage and straightforwardness amid the most 
unfavorable circumstances, in suppressing his 
natural sentiments of hatred and revenge, and in 
striving to understand the new conditions of his 
tribe among our increasing white people, Anto- 
nito Azul has been a worth disciple of Monte- 
zuma. His conduct was as good as that of Peter 
the Great, for he also took a long journey and 
studied as an apprentice that he might return 
and lead his people into higher reaches of knowl- 
edge." 

Recently I went to the home of two of our 
graduates on one of the side streets of Hampton. 
This couple have a comfortable frame house of 
six rooms, which they have paid for from their 
earnings. The husband has been a bookkeeper 
in the school treasurer's office since his gradua- 
tion in 1885. The wife, who was a graduate of 
the previous year, went back to her home in 
Georgia and taught for a year in a country, 
school, spending her Saturdays in going from 
house to house and showing the people how to 
make their homes comfortable, and her Sundays 
in instructing old and young out of God's Word. 



144 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

After a year of this work she returned to the 
town of Hampton and married the young man 
of whom I have spoken. Her home became, as do 
those of most of our graduates, a sort of social 
settlement. Every week on Tuesday a company 
of girls who were out at service gathered to learn 
how to cook and sew. Her girls' club has grown 
from ten or twelve to over a hundred members, 
and her efforts to help the neighborhood in vari- 
ous ways have developed into real social settle- 
ment work. Her husband has built a clubhouse 
as a centre for this work on the lot adjoining his 
own, and here, three days in the week, gather 
large classes in plain sewing, hemstitching, shirt- 
waist making, basketry, and cooking. A kinder- 
garten class meets in a little upper room in her 
shed. A boys' club has been started, and in the 
summer there is a class in gardening. A song 
service is held every Sunday. In all these activi- 
ties she is assisted by three other Hampton grad- 
uates, who give their services cheerfully. The 
head of the settlement keeps in touch with the 
white women who employ her girls, and assists 
in adjusting difficulties when they occur. She 
keeps her own house and cares for her three chil- 
dren, makes her own garden, and still finds time 
to help her neighbors make theirs. The whole 
community is cleaner and better because this 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 145 

young woman lives there. Work similar to this 
is being done by scores of Hampton women in 
Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Black Belt of 
Alabama. 

The work of the husband of our Hampton 
settlement worker is no less important than her 
own. Soon after his graduation several of the 
graduates of the school joined with the people 
of the town to form a colored building and loan 
association. The young man of whom I am 
speaking became the secretary and mainstay of 
the association. It commenced business in 1889 
with twelve stockholders and eighteen shares of 
stock. It has grown until now it has 636 stock- 
holders, owning 2,212 shares, and a paid-in stock 
of $105,000, of which the colored people alone 
own $75,000. More than $200,000 has been 
loaned to colored people of the vicinity; more 
than 350 pieces of property have been acquired 
and homes built through its aid and it has long 
been regarded as one of the safest financial in- 
stitutions in Hampton. It is difficult to estimate 
the influence of this one home of Hampton grad- 
uates. 

At Calhoun, Alabama, there was started in 
1896 a movement intended to encourage the Ne- 
groes of the cotton belt to abandon the " lien 
system of cropping," which virtually enslaved 



146 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

them anew, and to establish themselves on land 
and in homes of their own. This movement, 
known, as cooperative land buying, was inau- 
gurated by Miss C. R. Thorn and Rev. Pitt 
Dillingham, Principals of the Calhoun School, 
one of Hampton's outgrowths. The practical 
details of the land buying have been worked out 
by John W. Lemon, a Hampton graduate, class 
of 1890, who has also acted for ten years as farm 
manager of the Calhoun School. The Princi- 
pals say of him that he has the entire confidence 
of the people, that he has endless patience in 
working out the details of the land company's 
business, and that his management has been most 
wise and sympathetic. The first piece of land 
purchased was a lot of 120 acres at cost of 
$800. On this four families were placed. At 
present (1904) the land company owns planta- 
tions containing nearly 4,000 acres of land. On 
this land 88 Negro families have settled and have 
paid in eight years $2*7,400. Sixty of these 
families hold the deeds for their farms and 
are living in comfortable two- or three-roomed 
houses, are raising their own food supplies, and 
are enjoying the self-respect which the ownership 
of property brings. The remaining families are 
gradually paying their balances and securing 
their deeds. What this means to the poor mort- 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 147 

gage-ridden farmer of the Black Belt it is diffi- 
cult to estimate. The men are being trained to 
business habits; and thriftlessness and hopeless 
poverty are giving place to energy and a degree 
of prosperity. 

The latest development of the work at Cal- 
houn is the buying of land and the building of 
homes by the school's graduates. One of the 
first to build a better home for his mother was 
Boyd Rhetta, who came to Hampton after finish- 
ing his course at Calhoun, graduating in 1901. 
On his return home he found his mother and 
brothers and sisters in a very uncomfortable one- 
room cabin, and heard the story of his father's 
thriftlessness, debt, and misused opportunities. 
Inspired by the Hampton and Calhoun ideas of 
self-help and self-support, he determined to join 
the land company, get a good farm for himself, 
and make a new home for his mother. Seeing a 
chance to earn money in the mines near Birming- 
ham, he left home to work there. In a little over 
a year he forwarded to the land company 
$525.75, besides supporting his mother and her 
children. He has now made his first and second 
payments on fifty acres of land, and his mother 
is living in her own neat little three-room cot- 
tage, well built and painted, and fitted with glass 
windows — a luxury in that community, where 



148 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

the solid wooden shutter is almost universal. 
Having studied agriculture at Hampton, Rhetta 
is able to do good work on his farm. He has 
put up a substantial poultry house and is giving 
attention to his garden and orchard, as well as to 
the diversifying of his crops. He is determined 
to show that the people of Lowndes County can, 
if they will, make a good living from their 
farms. 

When I first went to Hampton twenty-five 
years ago I went into an evening class called the 
" plucky class." It was composed of boys who 
had worked all day in the sawmill or on the 
farm. The teacher was a Hampton graduate — 
Booker T. Washington. Just what this one 
Hampton graduate has meant to this country, 
and the influence that he has had over his own 
race in teaching them kindness and patience and 
industry, can never be estimated. General Arm- 
strong was right in saying that if Hampton had 
done nothing else than graduate Booker Wash- 
ington it would have paid for itself. In Mr. 
Washington's class was a small thick-lipped 
Negro boy from a back county. He had come 
with no money, and was working his way 
through school by his labor in our sawmill. 
After graduation he went back to his home and 
took a school. The little building was soon too 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 149 

small for the crowds that came to him. He 
determined to enlarge it. This he did himself 
with the help of his boys, who worked Saturdays 
on the land in order to raise the money. After 
he had succeeded in getting his own school in 
order he induced other Hampton boys and girls 
to come to his county as teachers. He built his 
own home and cultivated land. Almost all the 
colored people in his county were renters. He 
helped them to buy land and build homes. The 
churches were improved. The migration from 
that county to Northern cities has been stopped. 
It is now more than five years since a Negro has 
gone from that county to the penitentiary. 
Ninety per cent of its Negro farmers own and 
manage their land. The relations between the 
whites and blacks are of the best. Not only in 
his own county, but through all of tidewater 
Virginia has the influence of that man been felt. 
He has driven out the saloon from a number of 
counties, and has helped to increase landholding, 
so that in thirty-three counties of tidewater 
Virginia more than seventy per cent of the 
Negro farmers own and manage their land. 

In my early days at Hampton I had a class 
of Negro preachers. They used to come from 
all the country around, spend the week at Hamp- 
ton and go back to their homes to preach on 



150 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Sunday. I tried to teach them the doctrine of 
making the Kingdom of God come here in better, 
cleaner homes. One of them became inspired 
with the idea of being a sort of " shepherd of 
Kingdom Come " among his people. He had a 
little church one mile outside the city of Ports- 
mouth in Virginia. Here he started a model 
Negro settlement. With the help of other 
Hamptonians he bought thirty acres of land, 
divided it into building lots, and commenced to 
sell to colored people working in Norfolk and 
Portsmouth. When the settlement began, $500 
would have bought all the property owned by 
colored men there. They now own over one 
hundred and twenty-five buildings, costing from 
$350 to $2,500 each. Over three hundred col- 
ored people live there, and there has never been 
an arrest nor has there been a saloon in the town. 
The morals and order of the place are as good 
as anywhere in the South. The Hampton stu- 
dent did become " the shepherd of Kingdom 
Come." 

One Sunday a colored boy at Hampton named 
Sheppard went with me to establish a mission 
station at a place called Slabtown, a little out 
from the school. He gained there, as he after- 
ward said, his first idea of missionary work. 
[After leaving Hampton he became a missionary 



HAMPTON INSTITUTE 151 

of the Presbyterian Church, South, and was sent 
with a son of Judge Lapsley, a prominent 
Southern white man, to Luebo, a station one 
thousand miles from the west coast of Africa, on 
a branch of the Congo. Both these mission- 
aries became interested in the Bakuba, who lived 
fifty miles farther inland but often passed their 
doors carrying ivory and rubber to the traders. 
Although the king of these people had forbidden 
all foreigners, on pain of death, to visit his ter- 
ritory, these missionaries decided to go to them. 
Sheppard learned their language from the men 
who came to his door. The white missionary, 
Lapsley, died, but with much courage and tact 
Sheppard pushed his way into the Bakuba 
country. Because of his discoveries on that 
journey he was made a Fellow of the Royal 
Geographical Society. Instead of being be- 
headed by the chief of the Bakuba, he was well 
received and given much power. He has built 
a large church where recently sixty converts were 
baptized on one Sabbath. A late number of 
The Missionary said of him : " He not only 
builds churches and preaches the gospel and 
beautifies the land with broad avenues and boule- 
vards, but, like, Luke, he is also the beloved 
physician. He is known, loved, and reverenced 
by the natives far and wide." Still another 



152 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Hampton student, who went as a missionary to 
Liberia, not only preaches but has a large coiFee 
farm and has been practicing the blacksmith's 
trade which he learned at Hampton, One of his 
last letters tells of having just completed the only 
iron bridge ever built in Liberia, Thus the in- 
fluence of the Hampton School is felt even in 
the remotest parts of the earth. 



V 

ATLANTA UNIVEESITY 

BY 
PEOFESSOR W. E. BURGHARDT DUBOIS 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY. 

Most men in this world are colored. A faith 
in humanity, therefore, a belief in the gradual 
growth and perf ectability of men must, if honest, 
be primarily a belief in colored men. Atlanta 
University was founded as an expression of the 
same faith in humanity within, as in humanity 
without the color line. That faith in men meant 
a firm belief that the great mass of human be- 
ings of all races and nations, withal their dif- 
ferences and peculiarities, were capable of es- 
sentially similar development and that the method 
of bringing about that development was by the 
education of youth. The founders of Atlanta 
University did not wait until this thesis was 
absolutely proven beyond peradventure — they 
held It to be a perfectly valid assumption to 
make, and to work on. Immediately, and there- 
fore they established Atlanta University^ two 
years after Lee surrendered. 

They did not establish simply a primary 
school, or a grammar school, or high school. On 
the contrary they established all these schools 

155 



156 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

and in addition to this a college, and made the 
college the centre and norm of all their work. 
They did this, first for the development of in- 
dividual Negro talent, — second, for inspiration 
and leadership of Negro communities, and 
third, for the supplying of teachers. Their 
primary idea was stated in perfectly plain 
language; they proposed to train men; they 
believed that a black boy with the capacity to 
learn, was worth teaching and that the only 
limitations to the development of an individual 
human soul were that soul's capacity and its ob- 
ligations to its fellow men — its duty to society. 
In the case of the emancipated and enfranchised 
Negro this duty to his fellow men revealed itself 
most pressingly and imperatively as a call for en- 
lightenment and inspiration for the mass from 
leaders. Much as the Negro race needed to 
know in agriculture, they needed to know still 
more as to life. They were poor carpenters, 
but they were still poorer fathers and mothers; 
they did not understand the methods of modern 
industry, but they knew even less of the aims 
of that civilization which industry serves. Sad 
it was that the slave was an undeveloped hand, 
it was far sadder that he was an undeveloped 
man. This, then, was the second problem to 
which the founders of Atlanta University ad- 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 157 

dressed themselves, and it was no small one. 
There are many ways of developing manhood 
and inspiring men. All ways this institution 
did not try, but it did try one which the experi- 
ence of four thousand years of civilized life on 
this earth has proven of foremost value — and 
that is the sending of missionaries of culture 
among the masses. This is not the only teaching 
a mass of untaught people need — they need 
teaching in the technique of industry, in methods 
of business, in the science of agriculture. But 
they need especially in their halting, hesitating 
beginnings the guidance of men who know what 
civilization means — who stand before them as 
guides not simply to teach them how to walk, but 
to teach them whither to go, and while logically 
we may argue that learning to walk ought to 
precede preparations for a great journey, yet as 
a matter of fact and history, it is the inspiration 
of some goal to be reached that has ever led men 
to learn how to get there. 

The third object of Atlanta University was 
to train teachers. Everybody, both in Recon- 
struction days and now, agrees that some amount 
of elementary training is necessary for the 
Freedmen's sons. Missionaries, government 
agents and army officers all agreed from the first 
that schools were needed. But schools call for 



158 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

teachers and, therefore Normal schools were 
needed. Nor was this all. A Normal school 
in Massachusetts trains an educated person 
in the art of teaching. In the South, among 
Negroes after the war, there was no such edu- 
cated class to train. A normal school then in 
the South must be primarily a high school and 
college ; it must first educate its teachers and then 
train them to teach. 

And, moreover, in case it cannot do both these 
things well, surely it is far better to send out 
among the masses educated persons who lack 
technical training in methods of teaching rather 
than to send persons who have technique with- 
out education. So that in these three ways At- 
lanta University was demanded : to train talented 
Negro youth, to disseminate civilization among 
the untaught masses, and to educate teachers. 

It is, however, one thing to conceive a great 
human need and quite another thing to realize 
this in deeds and sacrifices, in bricks and stone. 
And when in the world's history struggling 
human beings have in doubt and travail, in 
weariness and anxiety, established a great en- 
gine of human betterment, it behooves us who sit 
and see and hope in God's good time to help — 
to ask what they did and how they did it and 
who were the men that did these things. These 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 159 

questions it is my task to answer and to show 
how there to the southward, where the great Blue 
Ridge first bows and crumbles before the far-off 
sea, twelve men in 1867 founded an institution 
of learning which has meant so much to the 
higher aspirations and untrammelled develop- 
ment of two hundred million black men on 
this earth. These men created on the barren 
red mud of North Georgia a little cluster of 
brick buildings, now six in number, which have 
mothered five thousand sons and daughters in 
thirty-five years and which first, last and ever 
have stood for one unwavering ideal. They 
created this institution out of poverty and dis- 
trust in the midst of enmity and danger, in the 
face of ignorance and crime. Dying, they left 
their legacy to us — their legacy and their 
burden. 

What sort of men established and carried on 
the work of Atlanta University ? They were not 
all visionaries and dreamers, and yet among 
them were men who saw the vision and dreamed 
the dream. Two of the original founders rep- 
resented the American Missionary Association, 
that great movement born at the slaveship that 
wandered into Connecticut and coming to the 
fullness of manhood just as the nation needed 
it in the reconstruction crisis. One was a tall 



160 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

and dark-haired man, who afterward carried 
the idea of equal opportunity for black men to 
Nashville and founded Fisk University there; 
three were northern business men, resident in 
Atlanta; two were Negroes, new clothed with 
authority, and one was Edmund Ware. These 
men are nearly all dead to-day, but around the 
work of their hands have clustered many and 
diverse helpers. A bishop like Atticus G. Hay- 
good, Southern bred, but emancipated and hon- 
est; a justice of the Georgia Supreme Court 
like McKay; a president of one of Atlanta's 
greatest banks; and men like Charles Cuthbert 
Hall, of New York, and Samuel M. Crothers, of 
Cambridge. To-day Atlanta University is di- 
rected by four of its own graduates and by 
members of the governing boards or faculties of 
Harvard and Yale Universities, Williams and 
Dartmouth Colleges, Union Theological Semi- 
nary, and Tuskegee Institute. 

But, after all, the founder of Atlanta Univer- 
sity was Edmund Ware, and Edmund Ware was 
a man of faith. We are not dealing in faith 
these days. We are discounting it, and some- 
times half sneering at it. Because in the past 
a certain type of simple-hearted enthusiast has 
believed so piteously in things absurd, impossi- 
ble and false, we have come to discount the whole 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 161 

proceeding, striving to know even where knowl- 
edge is yet impossible, and pitying loftily that 
old-fashioned goodness that believed in men, 
that glorified in sacrifice, and had an unwaver- 
ing faith that somewhere beyond the mists was 
a good God, and that the world was as good as 
the God that made it. Edmund Asa Ware was 
born in North Wrentham, now Norfolk, Mass., 
a few miles from Boston, in 1837. He fitted 
for college at the Norwich Free Academy, Con- 
necticut, and was graduated from Yale Univer- 
sity in 1863. After his graduation, he taught 
for a time in the school in which he had fitted 
for college, and then was principal of a public 
school in Nashville, Tenn. Soon the way opened 
for him to enter a field of labor of which he had 
dreamed and planned In his schoolboy days, and 
he began the life work for which he believed he 
had a divine commission and from which he 
could not be diverted by his alluring offers of 
money, comfort and position. His friend has 
written of him : 

" He was conscientious. His mother had no 
recollection of his ever being untruthful. His 
village teachers all commended him for his un- 
varying conformity to the right In school. It Is 
said that when fifteen years old, he had never 
been absent a day, nor had a mark for tardiness. 



162 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

One morning as the bell stopped, writes one, his 
seat was observed to be vacant. Those near the 
windows, looking out, saw him running at full 
speed, trying to gain his seat before his name 
should be called. The teacher was seen to cast 
an eye to the window and then to linger a mo- 
ment before he called the roll. Thus he was 
seated to respond when the W's were reached." 

What sort of a man did such a boy make.^* 
Certainly not a good business man in the mod- 
ern sense; not a leader in literature or polite 
society; not a member of Congress; nor even a 
promising pillar of the State Legislature. And 
yet, after this man had lived less than fifty years 
and lay white, thin and dead in the darkened 
halls of Atlanta University, there came a stream 
of men who had known him, black and white, 
student and teacher, Northerner and Southerner, 
and this is the picture they painted : 

The Superintendent of the Freedman's Bureau 
for Georgia, said : " It was he who counselled 
and advised with the colored and other members 
of the constitution convention and secured the 
wise provision in the constitution for the estab- 
lishment of a public school system, and after- 
wards, with members of the first Legislature, 
by which it was established and put into opera- 
tion. He was in thorough sympathy with the 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 163 

religious work carried on at the same time by 
the Christian teachers and church organizations, 
but found oftentimes his greatest difficulties in 
overcoming the sectarian differences which in- 
terfered with the harmonious operation of the 
school work. This he had always in view, and, 
by his gentleness and forbearance and generous 
catholic spirit, he removed many ignorant preju- 
dices that stood in the way." 

A student said : " His manner of speech was 
terse, laconic, forceful, animated, in perfect 
harmony with the fervency of soul, with that 
restless activity which was so peculiarly mani- 
fest in all his doings. On leaving him I felt 
that I had been talking with a man who was 
living a higher life, living above the ordinary 
aims and petty ambitions of this world, a man 
who, though toiling in a field obscure and un- 
popular, nevertheless was entirely devoted to the 
cause he had espoused, and showed in every look 
and word a faith which rose sublimely above the 
mists and shadows of the present.'' 
" This spirit of work which so completely pos- 
sessed Mr. Ware, he naturally endeavored to 
transfuse Into his pupils. I shall never forget 
those talks he used to give to the students every 
year just before the closing of school for the 
summer vacation. With what emphasis he used 



16^ FROINI SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

to say to the young men : ^ Now, if you can get 
schools to teach, it is well. Teach them. Do all 
the good you can. But if you can't get schools 
to teach, don't hesitate a minute to work with 
your hands. Go into the field. Dig, hoe, pick 
cotton. Labor is honorable.' " 

Another graduate said : " After that inter- 
view with him alone, after feeling his tender 
caresses as he sat near me, and after listening 
to the mild tones of his voice, and seeing, face 
to face, those eyes, not now indignantly flashing, 
but full of sweetness and tenderness, after this, 
there never was any terror in that face or those 
eyes for me during all the following years that 
I knew him. During the last eighteen or nine- 
teen years I have seen many a student quail 
before that steady, withering gaze, which Mr. 
Ware knew so well how to use. But for me there 
ever remained that same soft expression, first 
seen during our first interview, in the little li- 
brary upstairs at Storrs' School in 1867. That 
look has, in a great measure, influenced my 
course of life; has often kept me in the right 
path, when temptation was strong to go other- 
wise." 

A friend added : " I think I never knew a 
man so strong of will who was so free from the 
lower self. If ordinarv ambition entered into 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 165 

his calculations, it strengthened by the reaction 
it aroused, tlic very virtue it assailed. It was 
preeminently as moral teacher and quickener that 
he excelled. True as steel himself, he felt a lie 
as men feel a personal insult. He did not like 
even an insincere or merely conventional tone." 
And finally Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and 
author of the " Brother in Black," and who was 
at one time a trustee of the University, in speak- 
ing of the " Man who can wait," said : " Only 
those who began with Mr. Ware nearly twenty 
years ago this new and difficult work of trying 
to educate in a rational and Christian manner 
the enfranchised people of this country, and so 
to help in introducing into the family of Chris- 
tian and civilized nations a new race, can under- 
stand how much Edmund Ware, when he first 
began work in this city, needed to be a man w^ho 
could do his work and wait. The conditions un- 
der wliich this work is carried on are different 
now; very small encouragement do workers in 
this field get from us of the white race in the 
Southern States, although next to the Negro 
race, we are, of all men on earth, most concerned 
in the success of your work and most concerned 
because we have most at stake in this work. The 
social environments are not inspiring now; but 



166 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

let me assure you 1885 is very far from 1865. 
To have gone on as President Ware did during 
those early years there must have been in his 
heart deathless love and pity for men who needed 
what he could give them, — a faith in the gospel 
and eternal righteousness that never wavered, 
and a love for God that made work easy and 
suffering joy." 

I have dwelt upon the character of this man 
because, in some places, it is the fashion of the 
day to represent those who went south after the 
war to help the f reedmen as officious busy-bodies, 
goody-goody sort of folk, with heads very nearly 
as soft as their hearts. And yet that wonder- 
ful call which sounded in the ears of the sons 
and daughters of the North in the later sixties 
was a call to far greater heroism and self-sacri- 
fice than that which called them earlier through 
the smoke of Sumter. They could not, like the 
soldiers, expect monuments, the notice of histo- 
rians, or even (shall I write it?) pensions, but 
they could expect work, danger, contempt, and 
forget fulness, and those who dared this, at least 
deserve the respect and reverence of thinking 



men 



I said that Edmund Ware was a man of faith. 
As early as 1867 he was writing North in his 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 167 

capacity as state superintendent of education; 
he said : 

"The Education Association will meet in 
Macon on the 9th of October, and then will come 
the demand for teachers. Please let me know 
before the time, how many teachers (board paid 
by colored people) you can give me, besides those 
at the points you already hold. Make a rough 
estimate, only make it large enough. You must 
do something on faith. I know the people of 
the North will do much more than they have yet 
done, if the matter is only presented in the right 
way to them. Get young ladies in each town 
to agree to carry round a paper, and get all the 
people to subscribe from ten cents to ten dollars 
per month, and then go round and collect it 
monthly. All that is wanted is a few workers 
in each city and town and it will all be done." 

After he became president of an institution on 
paper, then this wonderful unwaviering faith, 
slowly, surely became transmuted. The first 
building came from the American Missionary 
Association; the second from the State of 
Georgia, with its growing number of black legis- 
lators. The Recitation hall and the Manual 
Training building came from two Massachusetts 
women, the Housekeeping Cottage from circles 
of the King's Daughters and Rev. Dr. D. L. 



168 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Furber, the Training School from the General 
Educational Board and other friends, and now 
a Library from Andrew Carnegie, This has 
been the material growth. But that which 
Western colleges call the " plant " of Atlanta 
University, is the least of its real being. Our 
buildings are simple and small, not unpleasing 
in appearance, neat and substantial, but nothing 
calculated especially to impress the beholder. 
The peculiar spiritual growth which this in- 
stitution typifies is on the other hand the object 
of our especial pride. Not even the heavy loss 
caused by President Ware's premature death 
checked for a moment this inner growth, for a 
leader and successor stood ready trained in heart 
and mind for the work. 

Atlanta University is fortunate in having but 
two presidents in her thirty-five years of exist- 
ence. The successor of President Ware was the 
son of a man who, at one time, furnished many of 
the text-books which were used in the schools of 
Boston, and a nephew of Nathaniel P. Willis. 

President Bumstead was bom in Boston in 
1841, was graduated at the Boston Latin School, 
and in 1863 at Yale. He was major of the 
Forty-third United States Colored troops in the 
civil war and afterward graduated at Andover 
and entered the ministry. He joined Atlanta 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 169 

University as teacher of Science In 1875, and 
since that time as teacher and president has 
given to that institution the best years of a sin- 
gularly devoted life. His name will go down 
in history as that of the Apostle of the Higher 
Education of the American Negro. 

Many men. and women of energy and devotion 
have built their lives into this work. Every 
stone on that broad campus has meant the pulse 
of some man's life blood and the sacrifice of some 
woman's heart. There sits to-night within those 
Southern walls a woman bent and bowed, old with 
years, and yet ever young in the hearts of a 
thousand black men to whom, for thirty years, 
she was more than mother; there sounds within 
those halls to-day the voice of a white-haired man 
who, thirty-five years ago, sacrificed a govern- 
ment position and a good salary and brought his 
young wife down to live with black people. Not 
all the money that you and yours could give for 
a hundred years would do half as much to con- 
vince dark and outcast millions of the South 
that they have some friends in this world, as the 
sacrifice of such lives as these to the cause. 

I have said that the founder of this institu- 
tion planned a college — even a university. 
How far has that plan honestly been carried out? 
There are in name to-day numerous universities 



170 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

in the South for colored men, and this is often 
brought as an argument against Negro Col- 
leges — their absurdly overwhelming number. 
This is, in reality, untrue. There are very few 
institutions in the United States really doing 
college work for Negroes. Many institutions 
called colleges represent an ambition or an ideal, 
while as a matter of present fact such schools 
are higher institutions simply in name; in real- 
ity they are great primary and grammar schools 
with a score of high school students and a few 
or none of college grade. They represent, in 
many cases, high hopes and laudable ambition, 
but in some cases they have no present prospect 
or design of developing into real colleges, and 
in some other cases they have been tempted to 
be content with calling a high school a college, 
possibly after the venerable example of Harvard 
in its early days. This practice, however, has 
led to the suspicion that all Negro colleges are 
of low rank and parading more or less under 
false pretenses. 

There are in the United States to-day about 
five institutions which, by reason of the number 
of students and grade of work done, deserve to 
rank as Negro colleges. How far, now, is the 
work done at an institution like Atlanta Uni- 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 171 

versity deserving of the respect due to liberal 
training ? 

If there is one thing at Atlanta University 
upon which we pride ourselves it is that we have 
never succumbed to the temptation of mere num- 
bers. We have to-day seventy-five students of 
a rank above the high school — fifty in the regu- 
lar college course, and twenty-five in the teacher's 
college. It is fair to say that we might, by a 
general lowering of standard, easily have a col- 
lege of one hundred to one hundred and fifty. 
This we have steadily refused to do. On the 
contrary, we have sought unceasingly, year by 
year, to raise and fix a fair standard, and I 
think it is perfectly just to say that so far as 
our work goes in Atlanta University, the stand- 
ard equals that of any New England school. 
We have a high school of two hundred and twen- 
ty-five pupils, divided into two parallel courses 
of three years, an English and classical. This 
gives one year less than the New England high 
schools with their four-year courses. Above the 
high school there are two courses of study of- 
fered: a regular college course of four years, 
leading to the bachelor's degree and a teacher's 
training course of two years, leading to a nor- 
mal diploma. Our college rank is thus one year 
behind the smaller New England colleges, and 



172 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

this rank has been proven in case of several of 
our graduates, who have afterward taken the 
A.B. degree in leading Northern colleges after 
one year's study. 

In maintaining this standard we have, of 
course, our peculiar troubles. In New England 
there is difficulty in articulating the high school 
and college courses. In the South the almost 
total absence of high schools for Negroes makes 
a preparatory department necessary to a college 
like ours. All other Negro colleges in the South 
have grammar grades in addition, but we have 
simply the high school and the college, and con- 
sequently find our great difficulty in fitting our 
Junior high school year to the eighth grade of 
the public schools. The varying quality of 
work done in the public schools makes it neces- 
sary that our first year should be one of sifting 
and examination. About one-half of our public 
school candidates do the work of this class in a 
year; a fourth more do the work in something 
over a year, and are given electives so as to start 
even with the regular second year class. The 
other fourth, from poor preparation or lack of 
ability and other reasons, drop out. 

For admission to the high school we require 
eight grades of common school work. If the 
pupil proposes to take the full college course, 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 173 

he has before him about 2,800 recitation periods 
of forty-five minutes each, or, in laboratory work, 
of twice that length. Three-tenths of these are 
given to ancient languages, three-tenths evenly 
divided between science and mathematics, two- 
tenths to English and modem languages at the 
rate of English seven and German two, and two- 
tenths to history, sociology, philosophy and 
pedagogy at the rate of history and sociology 
nine and other studies two. In addition to this 
there are 884 hours of manual training. By 
electives the proportion of modern languages can 
be increased. 

The length of the entire normal course is five 
years, and the total number of recitation periods, 
of forty-five minutes each, is 2,028. Three- 
tenths of these are given to pedagogy, three- 
tenths to mathematics and science, two and a 
half tenths to English, one-tenth to philosophy 
and history, etc. 

How far is the charge true that old-fashioned 
studies and out-of-date methods are being used 
in Negro colleges to fit black boys for a world 
which prides itself on being rather ahead of time 
than even up with it? We willingly plead 
guilty to a persistent clinging to many of the 
older forms of discipline. We still count the 
teacher as of considerably more importance than 



174 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

the thing taught. This explains considerable 
amount of Latin in our curriculum. We have 
one of the most successful Latin teachers in the 
South, a man not only learned in method, but 
of great and peculiar personal influence. We 
are willing and anxious for our college men to 
have four or five years' contact with this man, 
and we seriously doubt if a greater course in 
engineering under a lesser man would be a real 
gain for the development of manhood among us. 
On the other hand, our teachers and instructors 
have been drawn from Yale, Harvard, Dart- 
mouth, Wellesley, Boston University, Worces- 
ter Polytechnic, Fisk and our own institution. 
Our dean ranked his class at Dartmouth; a 
former dean was the DeForest medal man at 
Yale; the head of our normal department is 
from Bridgewater, and for sixteen years has 
done some of the most successful normal work in 
the South ; two classmates of President Ware at 
Yale joined him in his work, and now his two 
children, from Yale and Columbia, are taking up 
their father's mantle. 

There are five full professors and ten instruc- 
tors. The library has 11,500 volumes, classified 
by the Dewey system and well selected. There 
IS a physical laboratory 50x22 feet. In which all 
class work is carried on by individual experl- 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 175 

ments and measurements. Adjoining this is a 
science lecture room with considerable apparatus. 
The chemical laboratory is 50x25 feet, with in- 
dividual desks and chemicals. There are small 
geological and mineralogical cabinets, and the 
beginning of a zoological cabinet in the lower 
orders. The astronomy class has a small tele- 
scope, and in the mathematical department there 
are surveying and engineering instruments. 
The department of Sociology and History has 
sets of modern and ancient maps and a class 
room library with reference works, duplicate 
text-books and statistical treatises. The recita- 
tion rooms are large and light, and nearly all 
furnished with tablet chairs. 

Manual training is an integral part of our 
work, and is carried on in two buildings, one for 
the girls and one for the boys. Manual train- 
ing is required of all High School students. 
The boys' building has a floor devoted to wood 
working, with power saws, planers, etc., a lum- 
ber storage room and a paint room. Another 
floor is occupied by the turning lathes, twenty 
individual benches with tools, and a drawing 
room with eighteen sets of instruments. In the 
basement, iron-working is carried on with forges 
and lathes. The printing office has a full equip- 
ment, including a power press. 



176 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Manual training for girls is carried on at the 
Housekeeping Cottage, and consists in cooking, 
sewing, dressmaking, drawing and general house- 
keeping. 

When we enumerate these facilities for man- 
ual training, people are usually surprised, and 
say, " Why, you have, then, an industrial school 
after all !" This we disclaim. We do not have 
an industrial department for the important work 
of teaching trades. Our equipment, almost 
without exception, is an integral part of our 
educational work, and is designed for its edu- 
cational effect alone. Just as the boy works 
with his own hands in the chemical laboratory 
or the laboratory in sociology, so he works in the 
manual training shop, and the object in all three 
cases is the same, viz. : to develop the boy to the 
full capacity of his powers, mental and phys- 
ical. With the education thus gained, the boy 
might use his chemistry in the study of medi- 
cine, or his sociology in the ministry, or his 
manual dexterity at a trade school, but we do not 
pretend to train either physicians, clergymen or 
carpenters. I speak of this because there is so 
much confusion of ideas on the point, especially 
so far as southern schools are concerned. 
Schools of higher training in the South are 
often supposed to be places without manual 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 177 

training, despising and ridiculing it, and know- 
ing nothing of its great educative power, while 
an industrial school is supposed to be necessarily 
and always a centre of education. 

If you should visit Atlanta University you 
would see little evidence of student manual work 
in finished products of wood, or iron, or stone. 
Our furniture is from the factory, our buildings 
erected by hired labor, and our important re- 
pairs largely done by outside workmen. Never- 
theless, the influence of our manual training of 
the students is easily traceable in their after life. 
When the conference for Southern Education, 
popularly associated with the Ogden parties, 
met in Athens, Ga., they especially admired the 
industrial exhibit of the Negro schools. " That 
is the sort of work that is needed," they said re- 
peatedly, "where was the Principal trained?" 
And then they found out that he and all his 
teachers came from Atlanta University. They 
had never learned basket making or clay modell- 
ing there, but they had received a far more fun- 
damental training in human power. With this 
as a basis, it took them but a short time to mas- 
ter the technique. 

The work of teacher training is also carried 
on by the laboratory method — that is it is cen- 
tred in the model school containing a kinder- 



178 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

garten and four grades (to be extended to eight 
grades eventually) with all the equipment of a 
modern school. Here, under instructors, the 
normal students teach, observe and experiment. 
I have indicated the formal curriculum of At- 
lanta University and the facilities for carrying 
it out. But this is not all of our educational 
work with our students. A centre of education 
with us is our school Home; among the earliest 
ideals entertained by the University is one that 
may be designated as home-building. In its 
first days, officers and teachers kept before the 
minds of students and their parents the desir- 
ability of securing land and homes, and many 
a cottage in Atlanta owes its existence to the 
personal counsel and pecuniary assistance of 
some teacher in the University; and when, at 
the beginning of a summer vacation, some three 
or four hundred were sent out to teach school in 
the smaller towns and rural districts, among 
other injunctions it was impressed upon them 
to encourage and assist the people among whom 
they were to labor, to buy land and make them- 
selves homes, and specific items of information 
with reference to accomplishing this were given 
them. And when these student teachers re- 
turned from their summer's work they were 
asked to report what they had done in this line 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 179 

and also to give facts they had gathered as to 
the amount of land the people owned or were 
buying. 

The effect of this policy is shown in the sta- 
tistics of Negro property in Georgia. Of 
course it would not be fair to claim that At- 
lanta University is solely responsible for this 
record, but certainly the influence of this insti- 
tution has been a potent factor in the increase 
of property from nearly nothing in 1860 to a 
real value of nearly thirty-five millions in 1905. 

Atlanta University is more than a school, it 
is a home. The dormitories are not simply a 
collection of rooms where students may study 
and lodge and care for themselves, but each of 
them is under the supervision of a competent 
woman, who takes the place of a mother and sees 
that the students are regular in their habits, tidy 
in dress, neat in the care of rooms, attentive to 
study, polite in manners, careful in regard to 
health, and made comfortable in illness. The 
dining room, too, where teachers and students 
assemble for meals, is not merely a commons, 
where simply a sufficient quantity of food is 
furnished, but is a place where teachers and 
students eat together, talk and learn to know 
each other; where the etiquette of family life 
is carefully observed — indeed this is one of the 



180 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

few places in America where black and white 
people meet as simple, friendly human souls, un- 
veiled from light and unguarded from feared 
contagion; bound in human sympathy and help. 

And so, in these ways, is carried out the inten- 
tion expressed in the first catalogue of 1868-70, 
and in the latest 1903-04i, in these words: " It 
is designed to make the school as far as possible 
a home for those who attend," and it may be 
added that in thus making it a home it becomes 
a home builder. 

With the home life go the home chores and 
duties — the care of the rooms, the sweeping of 
the halls, the washing of the dishes, and the lit- 
tle errands here and there. The comparatively 
small number of our students makes the home 
life peculiarly cheerful and cozy. Teachers and 
students know each other intimately, and in a 
way impossible in large institutions, and always 
the graduate looks back upon the home life as 
the greatest and best gift of the Alma Mater. 

Not only is Atlanta University a school and 
a home; it is in the larger sense of the word, a 
church. I do not mean by that anything nar- 
row or sectarian, but I do mean that we whose 
work it is to train youth in the South have to 
face some patent facts: first, the religious con- 
ditions among both whites and blacks are such 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 181 

that the differences between Methodists and Bap- 
tists sometimes overshadow the differences be- 
tween heaven and hell; that particularly among 
young educated Negroes this is a day of rapid 
religious evolution which might easily end any- 
where or nowhere; consequently it will not do 
in the South to leave moral training to individual 
homes, since their homes are just recovering 
from the debauchery of slavery, and only in a 
minority of instances are they capable of the 
necessary teaching. As the larger home, then, 
of its sons and daughters, Atlanta University is, 
and always has been, a teacher of religion and 
morality. Our chaplain, the son of the late 
president, and a graduate of Union Theological 
Seminary, is a young man of clear-hearted de- 
votion, and both his work and example are of 
great influence, A part of our religious exer- 
cises are voluntary and all of them are main- 
tained at a level of high earnestness with a mani- 
mum of cant and empty form. 

Such is our course of training. The great 
question, however, which men of right may ask 
of Atlanta University is, " What has this train- 
ing resulted in? How far has this institution 
justified its existence? How far has it trained 
men of talent, civilized communities, and given 
real teachers to the black south?" 



182 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

It is in the answer to this question that At- 
lanta University makes its greatest claim to pub- 
lic attention ; and yet it is a very difficult thing 
to exhibit a process of education to the eye. 

The experience in this line with which every 
teacher is so familiar is exaggerated in our case, 
for we and the whole Negro race are often 
judged for time and eternity by a fifteen-minute 
visitor. 

On the other hand, when in the towns and 
country districts of the South the work of the 
graduates and former students of this institu- 
tion is carefully studied, the verdict is always 
unanimous; that there is not in the country an 
institution which, in thirty-five years of work, 
has sent into the world a set of men and women 
stronger in character and attainment, and more 
useful in their fields of labor. The General 
Educational Board, after investigation, came 
to its endorsement on this ground particularly. 
Southern born men who still oppose Negro col- 
leges have repeatedly acknowledged the remark- 
able character of our graduates. The School 
Board of Atlanta has put the Negro public 
schools of the city under the almost complete 
control of teachers whom we have trained; the 
state of Georgia, while it gave us aid repeatedly, 
bore testimony through its committees of the 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 183 

high quahty of work done, and when afterwards 
that aid was taken from us and given to a new 
institution at Savannah, the institution was 
largely manned with our graduates, from its 
president down. 

Atlanta University has taught some five thou- 
sand students. Of these 677 have finished a full 
high school course, and 487 of them have re- 
ceived a degree or normal diploma: 



o 

o 



a> 
Occupations of Graduates 

Total 124 

Male 101 

Female 23 

Living 108 

Dead 16 

Teachers 62 

Ministers 13 

Physicians 4 

Lawyers 2 

Dentists 1 

U. S. Service 12 

Business 7 

Students 4 

Wives 1 

Others 2 

* Two graduated in two departments. 
1 44 other wives are classed as teachers. 



In its work of training teachers, Atlanta 
University has rendered its greatest service 
to the country. Sixty per cent of our grad- 



1^ 

o 

3 
EL 


o 


367 


*489 


15 


116 


352 


*373 


311 


*417 


41 


57 


178 


240 


• • o 


13 


• • • 


4 


• . , 


2 


• • • 


1 


2 


14 


8 


15 


3 


7 


fiio 


111 


10 


12 



184 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

uates teach; they teach in city and county, in 
pubhc and private schools, in primary, second- 
ary and higher schools, and the schools of all re- 
ligious denominations ; five are presidents of col- 
leges and normal schools, fourteen are principals 
of high and secondary schools, twenty are con- 
nected with industrial schools. I presume it is 
no exaggeration to say that our graduates and 
former students are reaching 20,000 black boys 
and girls each year, and handing on the light 
which they have received. 

The work done by these men as students has 
been honest and fair. Our graduates have made 
good records at Harvard, Dartmouth, and the 
University of Chicago, University of Michigan, 
and Northern professional schools like Andover 
and Hartford theological seminaries, and the 
University of Pennsylvania Medical School. 
Research work done at our institution has been, 
in several cases, published by the United States 
government, and even recognized abroad. We 
have not, so far as we know, graduated any men 
of very exceptional genius, but we have sent 
out a score of men of unusual ability, measured 
by any standard, and we have trained a few who, 
by ability and forceful personality, are above 
the average of the trained men of any race. 

Our great work, however, has been the sending 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 185 

of missionaries of culture throughout the south, 
and in this work Atlanta University has had con- 
spicuous success. Of course such an influence is 
difficult to measure. 

Considering the intimate connection of At- 
lanta University with the State of Georgia, we 
may, perhaps, best measure its influence by 
studying that state; in a sense Atlanta Univer- 
sity founded the public school system of the 
state, since its first president was the first state 
superintendent of education. Of the thirteen 
leading Negro institutions in the state outside of 
Atlanta University, seven have presidents trained 
at this school, and two or three others have 
some of our graduates as teachers; and all of 
them have students trained by our graduates. 
The public schools of all the leading cities, At- 
lanta, Savannah, Athens, Columbus, and Macon, 
are very largely manned by our former students, 
and in all walks of life the influence of our 
graduates and former students is felt. 

A recent study of Georgia* shows that Negro 
population, property and literacy in Georgia 
are increasing, while serious crime has begun to 
decrease. 

This record is not due to any one single cause, 

^Some Notes on Negro Crime. Atlanta Uni- 
versity Publication, No. 9. 



186 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

but certainly the influence of Atlanta University 
has been a most potent factor. In the work of 
Negro uplift throughout the land our graduates 
are not alone nor altogether singular — gradu- 
ates of a score of other worthy institutions are 
working with them, but the long, thorough 
courses of study in our work, the unbending men- 
tal discipline as a foundation for all work, wheth- 
er manual or intellectual, has left its enduring 
mark on the Atlanta University man. The work 
of these college trained men from this and other 
institutions is not to be judged simply by what 
they have done, but still more from what they 
have prevented. I am persuaded that Ameri- 
cans do not dwell enough on this side of the 
case. You complain of crime and vagrancy 
among Negroes, and both are large and threat- 
ening, as it is perfectly natural they should be, 
but consider what they might have been if this 
race had been left without leaders — not leaders 
who could simply read and write and hoe, but 
real thinkers, men of vision, men who realized the 
tremendous import of this vast social movement 
and could stand ever ready within the veil to 
calm passion and direct energy and say to the 
turbulent waters, " Peace be still." 

The peculiar character of work, however, 
makes Atlanta University more than a simple 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 18T 

college — it IS a social settlement where, for six 
or seven years, the best we can find of the grow- 
ing generation of Negroes is brought into con- 
tact with the standards of modern culture in 
school and home and campus. Nor do we wish 
to stop here — the Social Settlement aims to 
do more than teach the slums; it seeks also by 
studying slums to teach the world what slums 
mean. And Atlanta University seeks to become 
a centre for the careful, earnest and minute 
study of the Negro problems, through the ex- 
perience and active cooperation of other grad- 
uates scattered all over the south. For this pur- 
pose we have established a department of social 
inquiry and an Annual Conference to study the 
Negro problem; we have been careful not to let 
the size of the field or the intricacy and delicacy 
of the subject tempt us into superficial or hasty 
work. Each year some definite phase of the 
problem is taken, the inquiry is limited in ex- 
tent, and every effort is made to get thorough 
unbiased returns. To establish such a work with 
few funds, and untrained investigators was diffi- 
cult, but to-day, after nine years of work, we 
feel as though the department was permanently 
organized for efficient work, and that interesting 
and instructive results will follow its further 
prosecution. The nine investigations already 



188 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

accomplished make a fairly well rounded study 
of human life as lived by the American Negro. 
They consist of the following studies: 

1. Mortality among Negroes in Cities, 1896. 

2. Social and Physical Condition of Negroes 
in Cities, 1897. 

3. Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Bet- 
terment, 1898. 

4. The Negro in Business, 1899. 

5. The College-bred Negro, 1900. 

6. The Negro Common School, 1901. 

7. The Negro Artisan, 1902. 

8. The Negro Church, 1903. 

9. Crime Among Negroes, 1904. 

10. Methods and Results of Ten Years' Study, 
1905. 

Our present plan is to begin a second cycle 
of studies similar to these beginning with a 
study of Negro Mortality in 1906. 

The results of these studies have been widely 
used ; they are in the chief libraries of the world 
and have been commended by the London Times, 
The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian, The 
Outlook, The Nation, The Dial, The Inde- 
pendent, and leading daily papers. 

While we believe that social inquiry of this 
sort is fully justified if It seeks merely to know 
and publish that knowledge, we have also sought 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 189 

in addition to this to inspire our graduates in 
various communities to use the information we 
collect as a basis of concrete efforts in social 
betterment, and we can already point to some 
results of this policy. 

I have sought, thus far, to tell you who 
founded Atlanta University, what the institu- 
tion is, what it is doing and what it has done. 
There arises now naturally the question. What 
judgment is being passed upon this institution^ 
by its neighbors.?* After all the judgment of a 
man's peers is of great, if not of final value in 
determining his desert; and so to-day there has 
arisen in the North a not unnatural desire to 
give at least some weight to Southern opinion in 
judging the merits of Southern schools. This 
is perfectly proper, but it has some limitations. 
In the first place, you must not forget that 
Southern opinion is composed not simply of the 
opinion of whites, but also of blacks. Among 
the blacks it is hardly necessary to say that At- 
lanta University has long been regarded as the 
chiefest bulwark against the assaults of all 
forces within and without the race, which con- 
sciously or unconsciously work to narrow the 
opportunities and to curb the righteous ambi- 
tions of black men. Where we stood thirty-five 
years ago, to-day, on a plank of the widest and 



190 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

best education for black boys and girls, which 
they are capable of assimilating and using, we 
still stand. We do not regard this stand as the 
stubbornness of senility, but rather as the stead- 
fastness of the true faith. Many, however, both 
North and South, do not agree with us. To 
these we can only say, examine, not hastily nor 
superficially, but carefully and frankly, the re- 
sults of thirty-five years of higher education at 
Atlanta University and let us hear your verdict. 
We have said this to Northern skeptics and such 
as have investigated have in the large majority of 
cases come to agree with us. We have said this 
to the whites South, but in only a few cases have 
we been able to get the best class of Southern 
whites to examine and really learn about our 
work. The larger part of them either remain 
indifferent or unfriendly toward us. Why is 
this? Unless you visit and mingle with your 
next-door neighbors, you can easily remain per- 
fect strangers to them. In the South the whole 
community is cut in twain along the color line, 
only at the bottoms among the shadows of crime 
do they mingle; in real life, their bond is be- 
coming more and more purely economic. At the 
top among the better elements of both races 
there is little communication. It is therefore 
easy to see that the very class among which At- 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 191 

lanta University Is working Is the class least 
known by the average Southerner of to-day — 
the teachers, professional men, the business men 
with Negro clientele; on the other hand, he 
knows and Is interested in colored labor skilled 
and unskilled, and he is easily induced to visit 
Negro industrial schools. As the work of Negro 
colleges becomes in time known in the South it 
will be more and more appreciated, but it is 
largely unknown to-day. One of our white 
teachers was talking to an Intelligent Southerner 
not long since about education as a means of alle- 
viating distressing social conditions. " And yet," 
said he, " education doesn't always help. Take 
the case of the Negro: when did education ever 
do a Negro any good? Why, do you know 
three-fourths of the Negroes in our prisons are 
educated? " " How much education do you sup- 
pose they have?" asked the teacher. "They 
can read and write," he answered, " that Is about 
as far as the Negro can go In education. What- 
ever else he acquires is purely through the fac- 
ulty of imitation and the pity of it is that he 
always Imitates what Is worst." 

So, too, the president of an Important white 
school assured a recent French visitor that our 
graduates could find nothing to do except as 
bootblacks and porters. He had no Intention 



192 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

to deceive. Most of the Negroes he saw were 
unskilled menials, and he naturally supposed that 
practically all of them were. Moreover, it did 
not seem worth while for him to find out. 

To be sure there are exceptions and signs of 
progress: The Hon. G. R. Glenn, late State 
School Commissioner of Georgia, has said : 

" Many of our very best school teachers who 
are now at work in the public schools for colored 
children have either graduated at that institu- 
tion or have spent considerable time there acquir- 
ing their professional equipment. I commend 
the Atlanta University very cordially to all 
those friends of education who may desire to 
help the cause of education in the South." 

The present superintendent of the Atlanta 
Public Schools writes : 

" Atlanta University furnishes seventy-five 
per cent of the teachers for the Negro schools 
of this city. They are the best we have been 
able to obtain from any source. We have tried 
other teachers from other schools and colleges, 
and in proficiency they fall far below the nor- 
mal school graduates of Atlanta University." 

The Hon. Hoke Smith, of Atlanta, Ex-Sec- 
retary of the Interior in President Cleveland's 
cabinet testifies : 

" I have had occasion to watch the work of 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 193 

the Atlanta University for many years. I went 
very carefully through the institution several 
years ago and wrote the report upon it as State 
visitor from the University of Georgia. As 
President of the Board of Education of Atlanta, 
I have watched the institution, for from it 
largely we draw our teachers for our colored 
Bchools. My observation justifies my saying 
that we have obtained no better teachers for our 
colored public schools throughout the State than 
those furnished from the Atlanta University." 

Hon. Rufus B. Bullock, Ex-Governor of 
Georgia, says : " The Atlanta University dur- 
ing its thirty odd years of continuous work has 
won by its merit the highest esteem of the best 
people of our city and State. Its graduates are 
sought for by our State School Commissioners 
and by the school boards of our cities." 

Hon. Allan D. Candler, another Ex-Gover- 
nor says : " I know that this institution has 
done more (and I do not desire to disparage other 
institutions; I do not mean to disparage them), 
so far as my information has gone, to elevate 
the colored race than any other institution in 
the bounds of this State." 

And finally we may add the testimony of the 
Hon. John L. Hopkins (formerly Judge of Su- 
perior Court, Atlanta, Ga.) : " My opportunity 



194 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

for observing its work and for knowing the very 
spirit of the institution has been of the best. 
Being by birth and education a southern man, I 
could but look with critical eye, and really with 
some distrust, upon this attempt to confer the 
higher education upon the Negro, but the years 
have left me with no doubt as to the wisdom of 
all that has been done. It has been a noble and 
a successful work. With scant means and 
under great difficulties, the consecrated men in 
control have accomplished much direct good for 
the Negro, with a valuable reflex influence upon 
the white people." 

The active open opposition to our work has 
long since disappeared and here and there men 
who accidentally or through their daily work 
have been brought into contact with us have not 
hesitated to testify to its value. After all, the 
opposition to higher training for Negroes is not 
usually based on actual knowledge of its results, 
but rather upon its supposed inherent and 
theoretical absurdity when viewed as a policy; 
and back of such view, hidden or clouded, for- 
gotten or artfully concealed, sits the real un- 
spoken thing that prompts the oposition — 
namely, the feeling that black men are not men. 
There is no doubt of the unfortunate spread of 
anti-Negro prejudice in the North in recent 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 195 

years. There is no doubt of the spread of the 
caste spirit, even beyond the color line. This 
is a national calamity and calls for something 
more than exclamations and sighs on your part. 
It is not surely too much to ask that parents 
and teachers of the future citizens of the nation 
should see to it that they themselves are broad 
enough and honest enough and brave enough to 
recognize human desert and accomplishment 
under any human guise and to teach their pupils 
and children to do likewise; for this is no pass- 
ing difficulty ; no merely local problem ; nothing 
of even simply national concern. We have a 
way in America of wanting to be rid of prob- 
lems. It is not so much a desire to reach the 
best and largest solution as it is to clear the 
board and start a new game. Of this, our most 
sinister social problem, the future status and de- 
velopment of OjOOOjOOO Negroes, most Ameri- 
cans are simply tired and impatient. They do 
not want to solve it ; they do not want to under- 
stand it; they want simply to be done with it 
and hear the last of it. Of all possible attitudes, 
this is the most dangerous, because it fails to 
realize the most significant fact of the opening 
century, namely, that the Negro problem in 
America is but a local phase of a world problem, 
" The problem of the Twentieth Century is the 



196 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

problem of the color line/' Many smile incred- 
ulously at such a proposition, but let us see. The 
tendency of the great nations of the day is ter- 
ritorial and political expansion, but in nearly 
every case this has brought them in contact with 
darker peoples, so that we have to-day, England, 
France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Portugal, Hol- 
land, Belgium, and the United States in close 
contact with yellow, brown, and black peoples. 
The older idea was that the whites would eventu- 
ally displace the native race^ and inherit the 
earth; but this idea has been rudely shaken in 
the increase of the American Negroes, and 
of the native races in India, South Africa, 
and the West Indies, and in the development 
of South America. The policy of expansion, 
then, simply means world problems of the 
color line; the color question enters into 
the German and English imperial politics, 
shadows the problem of the Turk, shook the 
Triple Alliance through Italy's overthrow in 
Abyssinia, covers the islands of the sea from 
Australia to Hawaii and floods our continent 
from Alaska to Patagonia. Nor is this all. 
Since 732 when Charles Martel beat back the 
Saracens at Tours, the white races have had the 
hegemony, so far that white and civilized have 
become synonymous in every-day speech and 



ATLANTA UNIVERSITY 197 

men had well-nigh forgotten where civilization 
started. To-day for the first time in a 
thousand years the great white nation is meas- 
uring arms with the yellow nation and is shown 
to be distinctly inferior in civilization and 
ability. Whatever its end may be the Russo- 
Japanese war in epoch-making. The foolish 
modern magic of the word " white " is already 
broken and the color line has been crossed in 
modem times as it was in the great past; the 
awakening of the yellow races is certain, whether 
Japan wins or loses ; that the awakening of the 
brown and black races will follow in time no 
unprejudiced student of history can doubt; 
shall the awakening of these sleeping millions 
be in accordance with and aided by the greater 
ideals of white civilization or be in spite of them 
and against them? This is the problem of the 
yellow peril and of the color line, and it is the 
problem of the American Negro. Force and 
fear and repression have hitherto marked our 
attitude toward darker races. Shall this con- 
tinue or be replaced by freedom and friendship 
and opening opportunity.'^ Atlanta University 
stands for opportunity. 



VI 

FISK UNIVERSITY 

BY 
PRESIDENT JAMES G. MEERILL 



FISK UNIVERSITY 

The smoke of the titanic civil war had hardly 
lifted when Fisk University was born. It was 
cradled in the army barracks, abandoned by the 
Union Army ; it was christened by the name of a 
gallant soldier who had in charge the disposal of 
the property of the United States at Nashville. 
Governor Brownlow and other politicians, John 
Ogden and other educators, a regimental band 
and a motley crowd of ten thousand Negroes of 
all ages and conditions surrounded President 
Cravath on the initial day. He was the field 
secretary of the American Missionary Associa- 
tion, an old anti-slavery society. By his side 
stood the representative of the Freedman's Aid 
Commission. Moved by the inspiration of the 
occasion, under the influence of a life-long in- 
terest in the colored race Chaplain Cravath then 
and there announced the foundation principles 
of what has come to be one of the largest and 
widest-known Negro colleges in the world. Be- 
lieving in the brotherhood of man and the in- 
herent capabilities of the Negro he made the 

proclamation that the founding of the Fisk 
201 



202 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

School was the beginning of a great educa- 
tional Institution that should give to the eman- 
cipated race the opportunities and advantages 
of education which had so long been furnished 
to the white race in their colleges and universi- 
ties. A corps of sixteen teachers soon had 
under their charge a thousand pupils. The 
fifth reader, arithmetic and grammar were the 
most advanced studies at first, but, in less than 
ten years, four graduates received the A. B. 
diploma and three the diploma of the normal 
department. 

Poverty and faith went hand in hand until in 
sheer desperation was initiated the movement 
which has received its name from the world- 
renowned Jubilee Singers. The Treasurer, 
George L. White, was from the beginning in- 
structor in vocal music. He conceived the idea 
that by the singing of a company of colored 
young folk the hearts and hence the pockets of 
the North could be reached. Borrowing money 
from all of the teachers and from a few of the 
citizens of Nashville the little company went 
forth. Their path lay through Southern Ohio, 
where indignities and disappointments awaited 
them. It was only by the generosity of old-time 
abolitionists in the towns which they visited that 
they were enabled to fulfill their Ohio engage- 



FISK UNIVERSITY 203 

ments until they reached Oberlln, a town conse- 
crated to human freedom. The National 
Council of the Congregational Churches of the 
United States was in session at this place. An 
opportunity was afforded the singers to appear 
before the Council. The effect of their singing 
was indescribable. A new day had dawned for 
Fisk University. Not many days later Henry- 
Ward Beecher gave them a welcome to his 
church, and " Beecher's Negro Minstrels " 
packed Plymouth Church. Engagements for 
concerts followed quick and fast until money had 
been forwarded to Nashville sufficient to buy the 
present commanding campus of the institution 
and to determine the Trustees to erect a building 
which should make evident the fact that Fisk 
University was to stand for all time. 

The triumphs of the company were not con- 
fined to America. Great Britain and the conti- 
nent of Europe witnessed even more brilliant 
successes than America afforded. They ap- 
peared before the Queen of England, the Em- 
peror of Germany, and other crowned heads. 
They were the guests of the nobility and, at the 
end of seven years, they had laid at the feet of 
the University one hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars, one hundred thousand of which paid for 
Jubilee Hall. Where In the annals of education 



204 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

has the student body of any institution given, 
before graduation, such munificent gifts to its 
Alma Mater? 

One building after another has been erected 
upon the beautiful campus of thirty-five acres 
until now property valued at three hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars attests the faith of Fisk 
University in the higher education of the Negro, 
until to-day its collegiate department out- 
numbers that of any other of like grade in the 
world. Its aim to secure the best training has 
been attested by the fact that a graduate of Fisk 
in Nineteen Hundred and Three received from 
Yale University an A. M. in Nineteen Hundred 
and Four. Over two hundred and fifty have 
completed the college course. 

The vast majority of the Alumni of Fisk from 
the Normal and Collegiate departments are 
teachers ; fifteen thousand pupils are taught an- 
nually by those who have received their equip- 
ment for teaching at Fisk University. 

Allow me briefly to follow the career of a 
dozen of our graduates. James N. Calloway 
graduated in 1890 and immediately began to 
teach in Tuskegee Institute. He became busi- 
ness manager, and then farm manager and in 
1900 was sent to Africa in charge of four Tus- 
kegee graduates to experiment for the German 



FISK UNIVERSITY 205. 

government in the matter of cotton raising in 
West Africa. 

Prof. W. E. B. DuBois graduated in 1888, 
A native of Massachusetts, he recognized the im- 
portance of coming in contact with his race and 
took his college course at Fisk. Afterward he 
received his Master's and Doctor's Degrees at 
Harvard and gathered sociological data for the 
University of Pennsylvania, he studied in Ger- 
many for two years. Of his career as an author 
and his authority as a sociologist I need say 
nothing. 

Thomas S. Inborden, Principal of the Joseph 
K. Brick Industrial School, Enfield, North Caro- 
lina, graduated from Fisk in 1891. Few men 
have had a harder fight against poverty, while 
in college. Soon after graduation he organized 
a normal school in Helena, Arkansas, then he 
re-organized a school of like grade in Albany, 
Georgia. So successful was he that when a 
principal was to be found for the important en- 
terprise which he is now leading, Mr. Inborden 
was chosen to undertake this great undertaking. 
At present the institution has ten large and con- 
veniently arranged school buildings and a large 
corps of teachers. A farm of about twelve 
hundred acres is owned by the school, and courses 
of instruction are offered in varied industries. 



206 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Harriet F. Kimbro has been for six years pre- 
ceptress in the State Normal School at Prairie 
View, Texas. A hundred and twenty young 
women in the dormitories of this institution 
benefit by the rare womanly attributes and wide 
experience of this graduate of our first Normal 
Class, who also spent several years in teaching 
in the North. 

Mrs. Susan M. H. Lowe was also a member of 
the first Normal Class. After the death of her 
husband, Mrs. Lowe became a teacher in the 
Tennessee School for the Blind. She now has 
charge of the colored department of this school. 

Rev. George W. Moore graduated in 1881, 
took a Theological course at Oberlin, was called 
to the pastorate of the Lincoln Memorial 
Church, Washington, D. C. He led a successful 
crusade against thirteen saloons in " hell's bot- 
tom" the district in which his church was lo- 
cated, and thereby made it a desirable residence 
section. During his stay in Washington he 
was Professor of Biblical History and Literature 
in Howard University. At present and for the 
past thirteen years he has acted as Field Mis- 
sionary for the American Missionary Associa- 
tion. His eloquence as a speaker, his sagacity 
as an adviser, and his sympathy as a friend have 
made him preeminently successful in his responsi- 



FISK UNIVERSITY 207 

ble position. He has visited Europe as a dele- 
gate to several international gatherings. 

William Richard Morris graduated twenty- 
one years ago, was a tutor for three years and 
in 1889 moved to Minneapolis, Minn., and en- 
tered upon the practice of law. He has an ex- 
cellent practice and is an important factor in one 
of the leading churches of that city. 

Rev. H. H. Proctor has been out of college 
fourteen years. He carried off honors at 
Yale Divinity School. He has now a strong 
church of nearly five hundred members, so 
thoroughly organized for work as to have re- 
ceived the commendation of having the best 
organized church in the South, from an editorial 
correspondent in the Outlook, He has success- 
fully opposed several unwise measures introduced 
in the Georgia Legislature. He is a power for 
good in Atlanta. 

F. A. Stewart, M. D., graduated In 1885, was 
at the head of a class of ninety-eight in Har- 
vard Medical School. His professional life has 
been spent in Nashville where he has built up a 
large practice. Many of his patients are white. 
He owns a beautiful home In a good residence 
section of the city and Is Professor of Pathology 
in Meharry Medical College. 

Four years after Dr. Stewart, M. E. Stevens, 



208 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

M. D., now of Texarkana, Texas, graduated. 
He received his medical degree from the College 
of Physicians and Surgeons, Chicago, where he 
has also done much post-graduate work. In ad- 
dition to his large practice as a physician he 
owns a drug store which is doing a lucrative 
business. The value which he sets upon the 
education which he received at Fisk University 
is attested by the fact that he has bought a fine 
home near the campus where his wife watches 
over the educational training of their four 
children. 

Thomas W. Talley, Professor of Chemistry at 
Fisk, graduated in 1890 with literary and 
musical honors. In studying for his Master's 
Degree he took for his major study chemistry 
and thereby discovered his aptitude in the 
sciences. He came to us after a term of service 
as Instructor in Chemistry and Physics at Tus- 
kegee, preferring as he did to have under his 
tuition those who had the benefit of college train- 
ing. He has done considerable work in his- 
tology, chemistry, geology, and zoology and in 
botany. He has a valuable private collection. 
He Is a member of the American Ornithological 
Union, The American Negro Academy, the So- 
ciety of Chemical Industry of London, the Bio- 



FISK UNIVERSITY 209 

logical Society of Washington. He is a prince 
of teachers. 

Allan A. Wesley, M. D., graduated in 1884, 
and three years later from the medical depart- 
ment of the Northwestern University. He has 
obtained eminence from the practice of his pro- 
fession in Chicago. He was one of the founders 
of the Provident Hospital, which has connected 
with it a training school for colored nurses. He 
was surgeon of the celebrated Eighth Illinois 
Volunteers, a regiment officered throughout by 
colored men, which did honorable and responsible 
garrison work in Cuba when the First Illinois 
regiment was invalided home. Dr. Wesley was 
appointed to represent the Medical Department 
of the National Guard of Illinois at the conven- 
tion of Military Surgeons of the United States. 
He is a member of the American Medical Asso- 
ciation, Illinois State Medical Society, Chicago 
Medical Society, and associate member of the 
Military Service Institute at New York. 

Mrs. Booker T. Washington graduated from 
the College Department in 1889. As the wife 
of the Principal of Tuskegee, to which school 
she went as a teacher, she has had a large part 
in securing the success of this famous school. 
She has represented her Alma Mater in addresses 
given at the St. Louis Exposition on Fisk Day, 



210 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

and on other equally important occasions. Her 
literary work in the institution is matched by the 
grace with which she presides over her home and 
the helpful sympathy and instruction which she 
gives to the poor in the institution and in the 
vicinity of Tuskegee. 

The above are samples of work done by those 
who have been long enough out of college to 
have achieved success. Of the graduates from 
our school there are exceedingly few who are not 
doing faithful work, many have risen to posi- 
tions of influence. Naturally of the young 
women a large number become the wives and 
mothers of Christian homes. 

Of late a much larger proportion of the 
young men, than formerly, are studying medi- 
cine. Of the out-going class of this year there 
are those who purpose entering the professional 
schools at Harvard, Columbia, the University of 
Pennsylvania, and medical schools in Chicago, 
Without exception they purpose returning 
South for their life-work. Of course those who 
graduate from our institution are only a fraction 
of the great number who are shaped by its life. 
There are many who for financial reasons are 
unable to complete the course who have shown 
that they caught, while in Fisk^ the spirit of the 



FISK UNIVERSITY 211 

institution, whose underlying principle is " edu- 
cation for service." 

During the history of the institution there 
have been times when manual training was given ; 
this was sustained by an appropriation, but the 
fund employed having been withdrawn, this de- 
partment ceased to exist. All the money that 
could be secured was needed for the sustenance 
of the College and Normal Departments the out- 
put of which has been and is in instant demand. 

In fact the economic conditions of the South 
are such, as will appear later in this chapter, 
that it would be unbusinesslike to diminish in 
the least the efficiency of our college work, while 
the many schools devoted to industrial training 
amply meet the demand for those who are to 
work in industrial lines in that portion of our 
land where the rewards for those who work with 
their hands are exceedingly meagre. It must not 
be understood in the least that I decry industrial 
training ; on the other hand, as a source of men- 
tal development it is of great value to the college 
student, and I hope the day is not far away 
when, for this reason if for no other, Fisk can 
have a well-equipped industrial department. 
The two types of education are not antagonistic 
and can be made so only as those who are at the 
head of the different schools lack breadth of view. 



212 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Our only contention is that those who manage 
our educational institutions should so wisely in- 
terpret the economic conditions which suround 
them as to furnish the facilities to meet these 
conditions and, what is even more important, 
should never for a moment surrender faith in the 
capacity of any human being or yield to a spirit 
of cast which should shut the door of oppor- 
tunity in the face of any bright mind and 
earnest soul, 

I think it is rarely, however, understood in the 
North that economic and social conditions of the 
two sections of country are widely variant and 
hence that he alone can decide upon the type of 
education to be given to the Negro who has 
mastered the situation along these lines. 

The chief asset of Fisk University is its stu- 
dent body, those who are upon the ground, and 
its Alumni. To one attending morning prayers 
in Livingstone Chapel a sight is met alike 
pathetic and inspiring. The capacious hall is 
crowded with a company from the Guinea black 
to the blue-eyed and red-cheeked Saxon, there 
are black Germans, Irish Negroes, while in the 
veins of some of the students flows the blood of 
the far-famed Southern aristocracy. They 
come from nearly thirty States and Territories. 
They have been attracted to Fisk much as the 



FISK UNIVERSITY 213 

young men and women of the United States are 
drawn to Yale and Harvard, Smith and Vassar. 
Varying motives bring them to Fisk but speedily 
they find themselves surrounded by an atmos- 
phere of service, to be a factor in the develop- 
ment of a belated race becomes their ambition; 
not wealth, not place, but ability to lift up their 
fellows is the goal placed before them and few 
of those who receive the diploma of Fisk fail to 
reach this goal. 

Some characteristics of the Negro race work 
greatly in our favor. They are rarely revenge- 
ful, ordinarily they are of a forgiving spirit. 
They have learned to endure suffering and 
obloquy, and as the years go by they are mak- 
ing manifest the persistence requisite to over- 
come the tremendous odds against them. I 
have often told a story narrated by one of our 
young men when he was urging his fellow stu- 
dents to use the very obstacles which they meet 
as stepping stones for their success. He said, 
" We must have the spirit of an old mule on my 
father's farm. He had out-lived his usefulness. 
Die he wouldn't and kill him we couldn't. We 
could not afford to keep him. It became a fam- 
ily problem what to do with him. One day in 
wandering about the pasture he fell into a dry 
well ; we thought that Providence had solved the 



214 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

question for us. We had no means to extricate 
him ; the only alternative was to bury him alive. 
We gathered about the open well. Some tears 
were shed at his untimely end for he had been a 
faithful servant to the family. ' Bring the 
shovels,' said father, and the dirt began to fall 
upon his back. He trod it under his feet. 
More dirt fell, this he also trod under his feet 
until at last he came out on top, and there is 
where we are going to come." 

The pluck and perseverance which will enable 
a young man to work twelve months in a year for 
three years in the academy, four in the college 
and four in the professional school is the marked 
characteristic of the boys and young men whom 
we are trying to train. Certainly with such 
material to work upon we have a right to insist 
upon it that they should have the education 
which they crave and by means of which they are 
to be fitted for the solution of the biggest 
problem which the United States has on hand. 

We do not believe in the short cut to an edu- 
cation. " A little learning is a dangerous 
thing." It is the graduates of the lower grade 
schools, not of colleges, that make the so-called 
criminal classes against which Governors Vardi- 
man and JefF Davis inveigh in their tirade 
against Negro education. There has never been 



FISK UNIVERSITY 215 

a graduate of Fisk University, convicted of 
crime, within the walls of a penitentiary. We 
keep a very close tally of our hundreds of gradu- 
ates. We publish their names and their occu- 
pations each year In a carefully prepared roster 
appended to the annual catalogue of our student 
body. We know therefore of what we speak 
from an experience of more than a generation, 
and with ample time to learn the legitimate 
effects of the higher education when we declare 
that the Negro of America, constituting one- 
tenth of the population of the United States and 
by virtue of the Constitution of our country, a 
citizen of America, has a right to the same kind 
of an education that is afforded to the other 
races and peoples who constitute our body politic. 
There is something sublime in the magnificent 
way in which our young country seizes hold of 
the youth of the millions of immigrants to our 
shores and by means of the common schools and 
higher schools of learning fits them for citizen- 
ship. Rarely in the history of nations has been 
surpassed the training which we have given to 
the children of our antipodes falling to us as a 
legacy from a war with the belated Latin 
nations. Is it possible that a people believing 
in a square deal and in fair play are going to 
deny a tenth part of its population this boon, 



216 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

so freely given to the stranger within our gates 
and the greater stranger across the sea, to those 
who have every claim upon us in view of the 
cruel treatment which they have received at our 
hands in the three hundred years of African 
slavery, simply and solely because of a race 
prejudice? 

Is it possible that the United States of 
America is to accept as its code the sentiments 
belonging to a civilization out of date, unscien- 
tific, and unscriptural? Is there to be such a 
thing as cast in education in America? Is a 
Bourbon dynasty to be regnant in a republic? 
Shades of the Pilgrim Fathers, whose creed and 
life have shaped the destiny of the republic, rise 
in your might against your recreant sons who 
would tear away the foundations upon which our 
country rests, who would obliterate from the 
Word of God and the life of mankind, the 
brotherhood of man. 

The scheme of education at Fisk includes in 
the Institution proper the grammar grades, a 
college preparatory, and a college normal, mu- 
sical and theological departments. Connected 
with it and under its management is the Daniel 
Hand Training School. 

This training school while affording an op- 
portunity for Normal pupils to practice, gives 



FISK UNIVERSITY 217 

the children of the vicinage an elementary school 
shaped according to the latest approved theories 
of teaching. It employs many of the kinder- 
garten methods in its lower grades and uses in- 
dustrial methods in its upper grades. It im- 
plies a course of six years at the shortest. 

Out of this school the grammar grades of the 
University secure their best equipped pupils. 
The lowest grade in the grammar school is the 
sixth. To enter this a candidate must be able 
to write a letter and punctuate it correctly, have 
completed the elementary geography, have a 
thorough knowledge of both common and deci- 
mal fractions, of what is equivalent to the work 
required in Milne's arithmetic, up to denominate 
numbers. 

There are four grades in the grammar school. 
In order to pass from this school to the college 
preparatory or normal departments a pupil must 
have had a year in the essentials of algebra, two 
terms of Latin, a term of physical geography, 
and English history. 

The college preparatory course includes three 
years, not merely the Latin, Greek and mathe- 
matics of the traditional schools of this name 
but such teaching In science and English liter- 
ature as Is adapted to pupils of the age ordi- 
narily found In an academy. 



218 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

In the college proper two courses are open to 
the pupils, one reaching the degree of A. B., the 
other B. S., the latter has no study of Greek and 
substitutes for this additional study of the 
sciences. 

In the Junior preparatory year pupils instead 
of German can take a course in pedagogy in- 
cluding the practice of teaching in the training 
school. 

A comprehensive movement is on foot to cor- 
relate with the work hitherto undertaken by the 
University instruction which may perhaps be 
best designated by the term applied science. 
This as we use the term, is an enlargement of our 
present instruction in the sciences. In chem- 
istry, biology, histology, botany, and geology, 
as well as physics, our teaching force is to be in- 
creased by the co-operation of the John F. Slater 
Board, and thus the bearing of these varied 
sciences upon the life of the Negro as an agri- 
culturist and home builder will be emphasized 
and especially will our large contigent of teach- 
ers be fitted to teach those who are to be the 
farmers and house builders and tradesmen of the 
succeeding generations. 

This department will necessarily include some 
of the features of the distinctively industrial 
schools but they will be subsidiary to the main 



FISK UNIVERSITY 219 

purpose of the University, which is to train 
pupils who are to work along the lines for which 
the normal school and the college stand. 

There will be farming and horticulture and 
some of the labors of the artisan and the trades- 
man, domestic science and the like, carried on 
under competent instructors who in turn, will be 
under the supervision of the professors of the 
college department. As soon as a building 
can be secured to house this department the in- 
stitution will be able to carry forward strongly 
an undertaking that has long been desired by its 
management and which by the generous co- 
operation of the Slater Board can be now under- 
taken. 

The normal department which affords liter- 
ary instruction equivalent to the college prepara- 
tory course and two years in the college proper 
in addition to the specialization implied in nor- 
mal training is becoming more and more a potent 
factor in the University. Its pupils to do jus- 
tice to the course must have native ability and 
add to this attainments which enable them to 
work alongside the college students. The tend- 
ency which had become marked to have the 
normal department a kind of finishing school 
for young ladies after the type of the seminaries 
and academies for young women which have been 



220 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

so greatly in evidence in the South has been ar- 
rested in our University and in place of this a 
severe training which shall fit the pupils of this 
department for the amazing opportunities which 
await the young Negro teacher has been aimed 
at and to a large degree attained. 

Of the theological department little can be 
affirmed. Its graduates have been few. Until 
the past year its numbers have been very limited. 
It has taken on new life for a twelve month. 
Its future we hope will be more worthy of its 
broad foundations. 

It aims to give an equipment to its pupils 
which will enable them to feel at home in any 
evangelical pulpit. It adapts itself to the 
probable constituency which they will be called 
upon to serve. 

The musical department at Fisk is naturally 
a very important factor in the University. The 
most costly and imposing building upon the 
campus was erected by Jubilee Songs. The 
South no less than the North has learned of the 
value which is put upon musical training in Fisk 
University. The underlying principle of the de- 
partment is in accord with the familiar maxim, 
" Give me the songs of a people and I care not 
who makes the laws." This, true of every peo- 
ple, is peculiarly true of the Negro. Full of 



FISK UNIVERSITY 221 

rhythm and melody he delights in music of every 
form. Naturally by his environment ac- 
quainted with crude types of music it has been 
found that with rapidity and ease a love for the 
best classical music is secured. Moreover much 
of the so called rag-time music is composed to 
arouse the baser passions. To perpetuate it is 
to multiply incentives to vice. The surest and 
most direct way to eradicate it is to create and 
perpetuate a love for the highest and best in 
music. 

A race which in its Jubilee Songs has pro- 
duced genuine American music, original in its 
structure and pleasing alike to all not only in 
America but also across the sea, has a right to a 
peculiar recognition in the value of music and 
should be encouraged to utilize this art for its 
own mental and moral advancement and for the 
delight of those to whom their songs so amaz- 
ingly appeal. It may be added that the gradu- 
ates of our musical department are in great 
demand. Twenty times their number could find 
instant employment. 

It is in view of these underlying principles of 
our school that I would briefly present as my 
main contention: An American education for 
Americans. 



FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 



There are three axioms underlying my theme : 

First. — Every boy and girl of school age in 
the United States has a right to an education 
that will fit him for citizenship. 

Second. — Each generation in America is re- 
sponsible for the education of the succeeding 
generation. 

Third. — Property in the United States 
should be taxed to support the schools which lie 
at the foundation of true prosperity in the 
Republic. 

America goes even farther than this, as is 
seen in the public opinion that impels men of 
means to endow schools and colleges to an extent 
that would make Croesus envious. 

I do not know of a more magnificent sight 
than the array of figures that represent the mil- 
lions upon millions which have been given by 
American millionaires to afford opportunities for 
an education, such as few of them had, to the 
generations to come in our land which is already 
a rival to the lands that have had centuries the 
start of ours in the matter of educational facil- 
ities. 

But the above factors in our problem are not 
equally potent in all portions of our land. The 
civilization of our beautiful Southland has a 
different type from that of the North and West. 



FISK UNIVERSITY 223 

The Cavalier and the Puritan, a community of 
cities and villages and one more rural in its 
nature will take on different forms and it is not 
surprising that before the war none of the prin- 
ciples which I have enumerated above held sway 
in the South. 

But we have now a New South. Manufac- 
tories are springing up on every hand and vil- 
lage and city life follow. The freeing of the 
slave has vastly increased the number of those 
entitled to an education. The sentiment of the 
South fits itself in to the new order of things and 
the common school has among its best friends 
the public spirited men and women of that por- 
tion of the land which is coming to the front 
with rapid strides in the opening years of the 
new century. 

Another set of axioms underlie my theme : 

First. — The same degree and kind of school- 
ing should not be given to all. 

Second. — While the common school education 
should be afforded to all, manual training and 
technical, so far as possible, should be given to 
those who because of natural gifts or anticipated 
opportunities can make use of them. 

Third. — The Higher Education should be af- 
forded those who have the mental equipment to 
acquire it and when educated to use it. 



224 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

Here as you can readily see come In two mat- 
ters that lie at the root of the widely diverse 
opinions concerning the education of the Afro- 
Americans. 

One of these opinions is based upon prejudice. 
The man of the South can not conceive of the 
ability of the children of ex-slaves being a match 
to that of the children of ex-masters. The man 
of the North Is holding to the doctrine of human 
brotherhood and his Interpretation of the 
Declaration of Independence has expected 
of those who did not have the heredity of 
an educated ancestry achievements which can 
only be attained by the training of centuries. 
Fortunately we live In an age when men who 
differ in their views are not for this reason 
enemies. Prejudice no longer rules all the peo- 
ple and the North and the South are to a larger 
extent than ever before seeing eye to eye In this 
matter. Within the last month Dr. Booker T. 
Washington before a crowded audience In the 
most fashionable church In Boston made a mag- 
nificent plea for the Higher Education of the 
Negro. He declared that to say that the Indus- 
trial School alone should be opened for the 
Negro was an Insult to his race and cast a 
slight upon the type of education of which he 
is the unmatched champion while to-day In the 



FISK UNIVERSITY 225 

city of Nashville the men who represent the best 
things sociall}'^, educationally, and in a business 
way, endorse enthusiastically and unequivocally 
Fisk University which, through thick and thin, 
has stood for the highest education possible for 
the Negro, while, moreover, as I have before 
intimated, it can be said that the man is both 
benighted and belated who does not know that 
the Afro-American has the mental ability and 
moral determination ample to take on the best 
schooling that the proudest Universities of 
America can give. 

The second of the opinions that divide the 
people of our country is based upon ignorance 
of the economic conditions which affect this 
educational problem. This ignorance is not con- 
fined to any one section of our country. It pre- 
vails in the North as well as in the South. A 
bit of experience can illustrate the state of af- 
fairs at the North. I called to see a leading 
citizen of Philadelphia, a lawyer, a man who has 
no superior in educational circles and a life-long 
friend of the Negro. " I would like," said I, 
" to talk with you concerning the Negro prob- 
lem with which my University has to do.'' The 
man in a gentlemanly manner, but none the less 
'decidedly, made me feel that he had given the 
matter much more thought than I had, telling 



226 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

me, as he did, that for reasons that he would not 
give he had an acute interest in all that per- 
tained to the uplifting of the Negro. " I made 
up my mind," he said, " some years ago that I 
would give two bright colored boys a college 
and professional education. I fitted one for law 
and the other for medicine. Three years after 
they had graduated one was a barber and the 
other a porter in a Pullman car. I concluded 
that a man could make up berths without study- 
ing conic sections and could shave his customers 
without Blackstone. From that time I have 
given all that I could spare of my means to 
maintain a hospital for crippled colored children 
in Philadelphia." 

I have told this incident to many an audience 
in the North and have seen an expression go over 
the faces of nearly all present which said, that 
man's head is level. It is of no use to give the 
Negro college and professional education. He 
can not use it. 

Another incident shows the ignorance of the 
man living in the South. A friend of mine who 
has lived in Nashville for ten years was calling 
at my house and in the coiu-se of the conversa- 
tion I told him of the achievements of the gradu- 
ates of Fisk in the city of Nashville. I have 
rarely seen a more astonished man. The col- 



FISK UNIVERSITY 227 

ored people that he knew were the cook in his 
kitchen, the boy who waited on his table and the 
laborers in his mill. The others were the loafers 
on the street corners and the crowd on the 
electrics. Were he ill he would not think of in- 
quiring into the skill of the Negro physicians, 
who are gaining a most enviable reputation as 
practitioners, so enviable as to be employed 
by many white people. Did he have a case 
in court and want a lawyer he would be 
equally ignorant of the attainments and suc- 
cesses of the Negro lawyers. He never 
dreamed that Nashville has a colored dentist 
whose income is to a very large extent 
from the white people who employ him. He 
had never visited a public school taught as well 
by a force of Negro teachers as are any of the 
white public schools of the city and whose 
pupils on the days of promotion are advanced in 
a ratio fully equal to that of the white pupils. 
He had never been in a bank where a graduate 
of Oberlin and a grandson of the first Negro 
lawyer of the United States is cashier and 
Negroes own all the stock and direct all of its 
affairs. He had not hired as fine a livery team 
as Nashville affords, of a Negro liveryman, and, 
may he long be spared calling upon an under- 
taker, but when he does, if he wants to be buried 



228 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

in style he could, if he wished, employ not only 
the proprietor of one of the largest undertaking 
establishments in the city and what is more the 
owner of one of the best-cared-for cemeteries of 
the capital of Tennessee, a Negro. 

It has often been said that those only knew of 
the situation of affairs in the South, as far as 
the educated Negro is concerned, who because 
their work has been challenged so sharply both 
North and South, have taken the pains to ascer- 
tain the facts of the case. 

The fact is that the economic conditions south 
of the Mason and Dixon line are such that the 
graduate of a negro college has a more favorable 
chance to use his education than does the average 
white graduate North or South. Here comes in 
the law of supply and demand, a law as inevi- 
table in its working as the law of gravitation. 
A white boy fitted to practice medicine faces a 
situation that as a rule makes it necessary for 
him to go through years of starvation and after 
that how very few get a practice that is lucra- 
tive. On the other hand the young colored doc- 
tor caii hang out his shingle in our Southland 
with the assurance that almost anywhere he can 
find such a practice as will afford him a com- 
fortable living. He can not, to be sure, look for- 
ward to the receiving $50,000 fees, such as one 



FISK UNIVERSITY 229 

in fifty thousand of the white doctors can aspire 
to, but more and more as the social separation 
between the whites and the blacks of the South 
increases and the colored people become more 
loyal to their own, will the Negro doctor have 
occasion to thank God that he was born black. 

The same principle holds in the case of the 
Negro teacher. Theoretically there ought to 
be ten openings to the one he now has in the case 
of every college trained colored teacher. When 
our schools get out of the hands of the poli- 
ticians and into the hands of the educators this 
will be true and the signs of the times point in 
this direction and will point more decidedly so 
so long as such men as Superintendent Mynders, 
of Tennessee, hold office. Even under the pres- 
ent condition of things the law of supply and 
demand works in favor of the black race. 
Fisk University has to employ white teachers 
because it cannot afi^ord to hire colored ones. 
Our graduates step at once into positions that 
command better salaries than their teachers re- 
ceive. The same is true of the druggist. So 
long as, in the white drug store, the colored man 
can not " treat " his fiancee, so long will the 
pharmacist who can with his drugs sell the bev- 
erage that is so highly esteemed by the young 
people be in evidence. 



230 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

111 all these matters the one law prevails, that 
of supply and demand. And this has sway be- 
cause of social conditions that to us seem unfair. 
Here as elsewhere our Heavenly Father restrains 
the wrath of man and causes it to work for good 
to those against whom harm was intended. 

If the conditions which prevail in the North 
had prevailed through the South I can not see 
how it would have been possible to have escaped 
the perpetuation of servile employment on the 
part of all colored people that so largely obtains 
there. In tlie North we have one Maria Bald- 
win ; in the South many men and women hold 
positions of equal honor and emolument. 
Where are the clergymen of the North who have 
churches of the size and influence of a great 
number of the pii^tors of colored churches in the 
South .^ Dixie is the land where the Negro is to 
win his spurs. In tlie midst of his own troubles 
he is to find among his own people the successes 
that have been won by the leaders of other races. 

I must be pardoned for dwelling thus at 
length upon the economic situation as, because of 
ignorance in this direction, many men have held 
that the Negro race was to aff*ord an exception 
to the cardinal principles of education which 
have shaped the destiny of America. 

There can be no doubt to a candid mind alive 



FISK UNIVERSITY 231 

to the great principles of human fraternity 
which undcrhc our RcpubHc that so long as 
Science^ Scripture, and the Constitution of the 
United States unite in declaring the manhood of 
the AfricaHy so long is he entitled to all the 
education that is granted by public taxation to 
the most favored youth of the community in 
which he resides. 

Finally American Education in its inception 
included culture of heart and soul no less 
than of mind. I am sorry to confess that for 
many years the tendency has been toward the 
culture of the mind and body leaving in the 
background character. If I am not mistaken a 
return to the original type is begun and, at the 
time when the Afro- American is coming into the 
kingdom of letters, that tj^pe of education which 
his religious natui*e craves is beginning to be 
emphasized. They are regarded as the best 
teachers who by precept and example can best 
equip their pupils for such citizenship as can 
come alone tlirough the training of the heart 
as well as the head and hand. 

Here is found the mission of all those schools 
among us which, without sectarian bias but with 
Christian zeal, are sending forth, from year to 
year, the young people who are to mould into 
Christian citizenship our Negro youth. In the 



233 FROM SERVITUDE TO SERVICE 

great temple of education being builded In 
America there is a place to be filled by those who 
have come into possession of many traits of 
character which more favored people have lost 
and which the state must have if it is to be a 
part of the on-coming kingdom of righteousness. 
I look for the present century to disclose in the 
United States of America a contribution to cul- 
ture and character which can come alone through 
the education of Afro- America. 



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