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BOOKER T, WASHINGTON, A.M" LL.D.
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
Institute. Tuskegee. Ala.
Booher T. W 8shington, A.M., LL.D.
founder and Principal
TUSKEGEE NORMAL SCHOOL was opened July 4,
1881, with one teacher and thirty pupils in a dilapidated
shanty church rented from colored people.
The teacher was a graduate of Hampton Institute, a fonner
slave who e value as property wa $400. He had some experience
a a teacher
in West Virginia and
at Hampton.
When the state of
Alabama appropriated
$2,000 in 1880
for the establishment
of a Negro s c h 0 0 I
at Tuskegee, for t y
miles east of Montgomery,
Gen. S. C.
Armstrong, president
of Hampton, was
asked to suggest a
teacher. He recommended
Booker T.
Washington, then in
charge of Hampton's
night school. '
The young teacher
accepted the appointment,
and in June, 1880, began a work that has made Tuskegee
famou. as a model indu ·trial 'chool, and has given it
foundel' and leader a position as the acknowledged world-leader
of the egro race.
Before the school opened. the new teacher pent a month in
Macon Count.". Alabama, of which Tuskegee i, the county eat,
making a survey of the situation.
Studying the People
'With a mule and cart. he went through Macon Coullty
studying the actual life of the peopJe,- on the plantation, in the
home, the church, and the choo!' He found, during the tour,
326
" the one-room cabin stuffed with parents, children, amI nondescript
relatives; the fat pork and corn regimen; the highpriced
organ to satisfy musical aspirations, when there was only
one rusty fork to convey food to nine or ten mouths; the Saturday'
night exodus from the plantation to town; the cruelty of the
crop lien, and the stupidity of the one crop-system; farming by
spasms and not by calculation; the three months ungraded
school; the astonishing fervor in religion, matched by an equally
astonishing laxity in morals."
" What I discovered," he said, " discouraging as it appeared
at the time, was just what might have been expected. Some of
the people I met were living in practically the same places where
they, or their 'fathers and mothers, had previously been slaves.
The larger opportunities which freedom had brought to them,
important as it was for them potentially, had made very little
practical difference in their lives, or their methods of work, or
their customs, - they had remained just about as they had been
before Emancipation. In some cases where they had showed
their endeavor to get something better, the results were often
ludicrous. The truth that forced itself upon me was that these
people needed, not only hook learning, but a knowledge of how
to live, how to cultivate the soil, to buy land and to build houses,
and to make the most of their opportunities."
Pupils Thirty to Forty Years of Age
Noone under fifteen years of age was admitted to Tuskegee
at its opening, and none without previous schooling. Some of
the pupils were thirty or forty years of age, and most of them had
been or were school teachers. At the end of the first month
nearly fifty persons were enrolled, and two weeks later an additional
teacher, Miss Olivia A. Davidson, a graduate of Hampton,
and of the Framingham, Mass., ormal School, reached Tuskegee
to reinforce Mr. Washington's determination to "have the
student study things as well as books, acquire wholesome
personal habits as well as desirable intellectual habits, and learn
the parts and care of their bodies as well as the parts of their
speech and their use."
An abandoned farm of one hundred acres, one mile from
Tuskegee, was purchased for $500, with the help of General
Marshall, treasurer of Hampton, and other friends, and a
permanent site for the school was thus secured. The farmer's
stable and the henhouse were metamorphosed into recitation
rooms. The legislature of Alabama increased its appropriation
