Twenty years have now passed since I made the first humble effort
at Tuskegee, in a broken-down shanty and an old hen-house, without
owning a dollar's worth of property, and with but one teacher and
thirty students. At the present time the institution owns twenty-three hundred acres of land, one thousand of which are under
cultivation each year, entirely by student labour. There are now upon
the grounds, counting large and small, sixty-six buildings; and all
except four of these have been almost wholly erected by the labour of
our students. While the students are at work upon the land and in
erecting buildings, they are taught, by competent instructors, the
latest methods of agriculture and the trades connected with building.
There are in constant operation at the school, in connection with
thorough academic and religious training, thirty industrial
departments. All of these teach industries at which our men and women
can find immediate employment as soon as they leave the institution.
The only difficulty now is that the demand for our graduates from both
white and black people in the South is so great that we cannot supply
more than one-half the persons for whom applications come to us.
Neither have we the buildings nor the money for current expenses to
enable us to admit to the school more than one-half the young men and
women who apply to us for admission.
In our industrial teaching we keep three things in mind: first,
that the student shall be so educated that he shall be enabled to meet
conditions as they exist now, in the part of the South where he
lives — in a word, to be able to do the thing which the world wants
done; second, that every student who graduates from the school shall
have enough skill, coupled with intelligence and moral character, to
enable him to make a living for himself and others; third, to send
every graduate out feeling and knowing that labour is dignified and
beautiful — to make each one love labour instead of trying to escape
it. In addition to the agricultural training which we give to young
men, and the training given to our girls in all the usual domestic
employments, we now train a number of girls in agriculture each year.
These girls are taught gardening, fruit-growing, dairying, bee-culture, and poultry-raising.
While the institution is in no sense denominational, we have a
department known as the Phelps Hall Bible Training School, in which a
number of students are prepared for the ministry and other forms of
Christian work, especially work in the country districts. What is
equally important, each one of the students works . . . each day at
some industry, in order to get skill and the love of work, so that
when he goes out from the institution he is prepared to set the people
with whom he goes to labour a proper example in the matter of
industry.
The value of our property is now over $700,000. If we add to this
our endowment fund, which at present is $1,000,000, the value of the
total property is now $1,700,000. Aside from the need for more
buildings and for money for current expenses, the endowment fund
should be increased to at least $3,000,000. The annual current
expenses are now about $150,000. The greater part of this I collect
each year by going from door to door and from house to house. All of
our property is free from mortgage, and is deeded to an
undenominational [sic] board of trustees who have the control of the
institution.
From thirty students the number has grown to fourteen hundred,
coming from twenty-seven states and territories, from Africa, Cuba,
Porto Rico [sic], Jamaica, and other foreign countries. In our
departments there are one hundred and ten officers and instructors;
and if we add the families of our instructors, we have a constant
population upon our grounds of not far from seventeen hundred people.
I have often been asked how we keep so large a body of people
together, and at the same time keep them out of mischief. There are
two answers: that the men and women who come to us for an education
are in earnest; and that everybody is kept busy. The following
outline of our daily work will testify to this: —
