No. 1.] THE COLORED RACE. 259 



We believed that where we were dealing with a race, and 

 in the case of my race we must remember that before it was 

 brought into this country it had no necessity to labor. 

 After it was brought here, for two hundred and fifty years 

 my race was forced to labor under circumstances that were 

 calculated to do anything but give that race a love for the 

 beauty, the dignity, the civilizing power there is in labor 

 of the hand. So we said : " We are going to teach our 

 students to cultivate the soil, and raise, as far as possible, 

 the food that we art 1 ^oino; to consume." 



In this institution, beginning in a humble waj r , Ave have 

 gone on developing the industry of agriculture. At that 

 institution at the: present time our young men cultivate 

 every year something over seven hundred acres of land with 

 their own hands, and not only cultivate that land in a way 

 to make it bring in a return to our department, but in a 

 small degree they are making the farm an object lesson for 

 the students and the people in that section of the country. 

 We try to teach our students something of the chemistry 

 of the soil, the best and latest methods of dairying, care of 

 the stock, care of tools, and numbers of other lessons im- 

 portant for any people where we nmy remember that eighty- 

 five per cent of the population is living by some form of 

 agriculture. These students are not only taught these 

 agricultural lessons at Tuskegee, but, what is better, what 

 is most encouraging, as I hope to show later, they not only 

 get hold of these lessons, but they go out into the various 

 districts of the south and use those lessons in the better- 

 ment and uplifting of their fellowmen. 



Then we said : " Since at this institution we are without 

 buildings, we are going to teach the students how to erect 

 their own buildings, and give them this practical training 

 in the building of homes ; so that when they are through 

 with their education they can go out into the various dis- 

 tricts of the south and build their own homes, and teach 

 the people by whom they are surrounded also to build their 

 homes." Some people said we could not do that ; that it 

 was not a practical thing to teach our students to make the 



