What were we to do?
We had only the little old shanty and the abandoned church which the
good coloured people of the town of Tuskegee had kindly loaned us for
the accommodation of the classes. The number of students was
increasing daily. The more we saw of them, and the more we travelled
through the country districts, the more we saw that our efforts were
reaching, to only a partial degree, the actual needs of the people
whom we wanted to lift up through the medium of the students whom we
should education and send out as leaders.
The more we talked with the students, who were then coming to us
from several parts of the state, the more we found that the chief
ambition among a large proportion of them was to get an education so
that they would not have to work any longer with their hands.
This is illustrated by a story told of a coloured man in Alabama,
who, one hot day in July, while he was at work in a cotton-field,
suddenly stopped, and, looking toward the skies, said: "O Lawd, de
cottom am so grassy, de work am so hard, and the sun am so hot dat I
b'lieve dis darky am called to preach!"
About three months after the opening of the school, and at the
time when we were in the greatest anxiety about our work, there came
into market for sale an old and abandoned plantation which was
situated about a mile from the town of Tuskegee.
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