Booker T. Washington, Builder o - African American History

Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization. 65
24.03.2006
registered 437 teachers from fifteen Southern and several other States. Most of
these teachers elect such practical subjects as canning, basket-making, broommaking,
shuck and pine needlework or some form of manual training, as well as
the teacher-training courses. One of these students, who was the supervisor of
the Negro schools of an entire county, when she returned from her summer
school work proceeded to vivify her dead schools by introducing the making of
wash-boards, trash baskets, baskets made of weeping-willow, and pine needle
work in its various forms. The registration soared at once, the indifferent Negro
parents became interested, and before long the parents of white children
complained
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to the county superintendent that the colored children were being taught more
than their children.
There is at the present time being developed at Tuskegee a unique experiment in
the nature of what might be called a post-graduate school in real life for the
graduates of the agricultural department. This consists in providing such
graduates, who have no property of their own, with a forty-acre farm, on an
1,800-acre tract about nine miles from Tuskegee, known as Baldwin Farms,
after the late Wm. H. Baldwin, Jr., who was one of the ablest and most devoted
supporters and advisers of Booker Washington and Tuskegee. The land is held
by the Tuskegee Farm and Improvement Company which is conducted on a
business and not a charitable basis. The company sells the farms at an average
price of $15 an acre, and purchasers who move directly on to the land are given
ten years in which to pay for it, with the first payment at the end of the first
year. If there is no house on the land the company will put up a $300 house so
planned as to permit the addition of rooms and improvements as rapidly as the
purchaser is able to pay for them; the cost to be added to the initial cost of the
land. When the graduate lacks the money and equipment necessary to plant,
raise, and harvest crops, for this, too, the company will advance a reasonable
sum, taking as security a mortgage on crops and equipment until the loan has
been paid off. This mortgage bears interest at 8 per cent. while the interest on
the mortgage on the land is not more than 6 per cent. Through coÖperative
effort within this colony it is
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proposed to develop such organizations as coÖperative dairy, fruit growing,