To President Booker T. Washington,
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Ala.
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.
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