Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 119
In 1891 he established the Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference. He decided that
the school should not only help
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directly its own students, but should reach out and help the students' parents and
the older people generally in the country districts of the State. He started by
inviting the farmers and their wives in the immediate locality to spend a day at
the school for the frank discussion of their material and spiritual condition to the
end that the school might learn how it could best help them to help themselves.
From this simple beginning the Conference has grown until it now consists of
delegates from every Southern State, besides hundreds of teachers and
principals of Negro schools, Northern men and women, publicists and
philanthropists, newspaper and magazine writers, Southern white men and
Southern white women, all interested in helping the simple black folk in their
strivings to "quit libin' in de ashes," as one of them fervently expressed it. At
one of these conferences an old preacher from a country district concluded an
earnest prayer for the deliverance of his people from the bondage of ignorance
with this startling sentence: "And now, O Lord, put dy foot down in our hearts
and lif' us up!"
The year following Mr. Washington established a hospital in Greenwood
village, the hamlet adjoining the Institute grounds where live most of the
teachers, officers, and employees. It was at first hardly more than a dispensary,
but when the Institute acquired a Resident Physician two small buildings were
set aside as hospitals for men and women, respectively. Later a five-thousanddollar
building was given which served as the hospital until, in 1913, Mrs.
Elizabeth A. Mason, of Boston, presented Tuskegee
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with a fifty-thousand-dollar splendidly equipped modern hospital, in memory of
her grandfather, John A. Andrew, the War Governor of Massachusetts. While
these hospitals, from the first humble dispensary to the fine hospital of to-day,
were of course primarily for the Institute they were in true Tuskegee fashion
thrown open to all who needed them. And since the town of Tuskegee has no
hospital they have always been freely used by outside colored people. Mr.
Washington, himself, on his riding and hunting trips would from time to time
find sick people whom he would have brought to the hospital for care.
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