safe in saying
that the season now has a new meaning, not only through all that
immediate region, but, in a measure, wherever our graduates have gone.

At the present time one of the most satisfactory features of the
Christmas and Thanksgiving season at Tuskegee is the unselfish and
beautiful way in which our graduates and students spend their time in
administering to the comfort and happiness of others, especially the
unfortunate. Not long ago some of our young men spent a holiday
in rebuilding a cabin for a helpless coloured women who was about
seventy-five years old. At another time I remember that I made it known
in chapel, one night, that a very poor student was suffering from cold,
because he needed a coat. The next morning two coats were sent to my
office for him.

I have referred to the disposition on the part of the white people in
the town of Tuskegee and vicinity to help the school. From the first, I
resolved to make the school a real part of the community in which it was
located. I was determined that no one should have the feeling that it
was a foreign institution, dropped down in the midst of the people, for
which they had no responsibility and in which they had no interest.
I noticed that the very fact that they had been asking to contribute
toward the purchase of the land made them begin to feel as if it was
going to be their school, to a large degree. I noted that just in
proportion as we made the white people feel that the institution was
a part of the life of the community, and that, while we wanted to make
friends in Boston, for example, we also wanted to make white friends in
Tuskegee, and that we wanted to make the school of real service to all
the people, their attitude toward the school became favourable.

Perhaps I might add right here, what I hope to demonstrate later, that,
so far as I know, the Tuskegee school at the present time has no warmer
and more enthusiastic friends anywhere than it has among the white
citizens of Tuskegee and throughout the state of Alabama and the entire
South. From the first, I have advised our people in the South to
make friends in every straightforward, manly way with their next-door
neighbour, whether he be a black man or a white man. I have also advised
them, where no principle is at stake, to consult the interests of their
local communities, and to advise with their friends in regard to their
voting.

For several months the work of securing the money with w