There is no school that has better emulated
the best there is in Tuskegee Institute, and there is no graduate of
Tuskegee that has followed more faithfully and effectively in Booker
Washington's footsteps. Holtzclaw has told his own story in an
admirably written and most interesting book entitled, "The Black Man's
Burden." Starting in 1903 with a capital of seventy-five cents, no
land and no buildings in a little one-room, ramshackle log cabin,
which he did not own and in which he and his wife lived as well as
taught, Holtzclaw now has an annual enrollment of nearly five hundred
students and a faculty of thirty teachers. The school through its
varied forms of extension work influences yearly about thirty thousand
people. It owns seventeen hundred acres of land and conducts twenty
different industries aside from its academic work. The buildings and
property are valued at one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. It has
also its own electric light plant and water-works and an endowment of
over thirty-two thousand dollars. In concluding his book Mr. Holtzclaw
says: "I see more clearly than ever before the great task that is
before me, and I propose to continue the struggle. It is an appalling
task: a State with more than a million Negroes to be educated, with
half a million children of school age, 35 per cent. of whom at the
present time attend no school at all (only 36 per cent. in average
attendance), a State whose dual school system makes it impossible to
furnish more than a mere pittance for the education of each child--yet
these children must be educated, must be unfettered, set free. That
freedom for which Christian men and women, North and South, have
worked and prayed so long must be realized in the lives of these young
people. This, then, is my task, the war that I must wage; and I
propose to stay on the firing-line and fight the good fight of faith."

Another Tuskegee graduate in whom Mr. Washington was especially
interested is Isaac Fisher. Fisher has been awarded the following
prizes for his writings:

"What We've Learned About the Rum Question," $500; "German and
American Methods of Regulating Trusts," $400 (in order to write this
paper Mr. Fisher had to acquire a reading knowledge of German which he
did alone and unaided in a few months' time); "Ten of the Best Reasons
Why People Should Live in Missouri," $100; "A Plan to Give the South a
System of Highways Suited to Its Needs," $100; "The Most Practicable
M