h three
objects: first, it provided the chapel; second, it gave the students a
chance to get a practical knowledge of the trades connected with the
building; and, third, it enabled them to earn something toward the
payment of their board while receiving academic and industrial
training.

Having been fortified at Tuskegee by education of mind, skill of hand,
Christian character, ideas of thrift, economy, and push, and a spirit
of independence, the student is sent out to become a centre of
influence and light in showing the masses of our people in the Black
Belt of the South how to lift themselves up. Can this be done? I give
but one or two examples. Ten years ago a young coloured man came to
the institute from one of the large plantation districts. He studied
in the class-room a portion of the time, and received practical and
theoretical training on the farm the remainder of the time. Having
finished his course at Tuskegee, he returned to his plantation home,
which was in a county where the coloured people outnumbered the whites
six to one, as is true of many of the counties in the Black Belt of
the South. He found the Negroes in debt. Ever since the war they had
been mortgaging their crops for the food on which to live while the
crops were growing. The majority of them were living from
hand-to-mouth on rented land, in small one-room log cabins, and
attempting to pay a rate of interest on their advances that ranged
from fifteen to forty per cent. per annum. The school had been taught
in a wreck of a log cabin, with no apparatus, and had never been in
session longer than three months out of twelve. He found the people,
as many as eight or ten persons, of all ages and conditions and of
both sexes, huddled together and living in one-room cabins year after
year, and with a minister whose only aim was to work upon the
emotions. One can imagine something of the moral and religious state
of the community.

But the remedy! In spite of the evil the Negro got the habit of work
from slavery. The rank and file of the race, especially those on the
Southern plantations, work hard; but the trouble is that what they
earn gets away from them in high rents, crop mortgages, whiskey,
snuff, cheap jewelry, and the like. The young man just referred to had
been trained at Tuskegee, as most of our graduates are, to meet just
this condition of things. He took the three months' public school as
a nucleus for his work. Then he organized the old