He then and there began the long and difficult task of
teaching his people that physical work, and particularly farm work, if
rightly done was education, and that education was work. To secure the
acceptance of this truth by a race only recently emancipated from over
two hundred years of unrequited toil--a race that had always regarded
freedom from the necessity for work as an indication of
superiority--was not a hopeful task. To them education was the
antithesis of work. It was the magic elixir which emancipated all
those fortunate enough to drink of it from the necessity for work.

He also began to emphasize at this time his familiar dictum that
learning to do the common things of life in an uncommon way was an
essential part of real education. Probably the reverse of this dictum,
namely, learning to do the uncommon things of life in a common
way--would have more nearly corresponded to the popular conception of
education among most Negroes and many whites.

Mr. Washington later developed a brickyard where, after a series of
failures sufficient to convince any ordinary man of the hopelessness
of the enterprise, they finally succeeded in baking creditable bricks
which were used by the students in the construction of buildings for
the school. He did not start this brickyard for the purpose of
vocational training any more than he started the farm for agricultural
training. He started it because they needed bricks with which to
build buildings in which to live, just as he started the farm to raise
food upon which to live. He saw to it, however, that the brickyard was
used as an instrument of education and was never allowed to degenerate
into a mere brickyard and nothing more, just as he saw to it that the
farm was used as a means of education and was not allowed to
degenerate into a mere farm and nothing more. It was even more
difficult to persuade the students that the hard, heavy, dirty work of
the brickyard was education than it had been to persuade them that
farm work was education. Mr. Washington wasted no time in arguing this
point, however, but merely insisted that without bricks they could not
put up proper buildings, and that without buildings they could not
have such a school as they must have not only for themselves but for
their race.

[Illustration: Tuskegee Institute students laying the foundation for
one of the four Emery buildings--boys' dormitories.]

So this originally landless, buildingless, student