.
Washington founded for the purpose of helping his people to help
themselves tells a story of constructive achievement more impressive
than any amount of abstract eulogy.

The following is a list of such organizations given in chronological
order with a few words of description for the purpose of identifying
each:

In 1884 he founded the Teachers' Institute, consisting of summer
courses, conferences, and exhibits having as their main purpose the
extension of the advantages of Tuskegee Institute to the country
school teachers of the surrounding country. The work of this Institute
is described in the chapter: "Washington, the Educator."

In 1891 he established the Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference. He
decided that the school should not only help 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-thousand-dollar building was given
which served as the hospital until, in 1913, Mrs. Elizabeth A. Mason,
of Boston, presented Tuskegee with a fifty-thousand-dollar splendidly
equipped modern hospital, in memory of her