useful, and their church services more
inspiring. All this was done not with an idea of starting an extension
department or a social service department, but merely because these
people needed help, and Mr. Washington knew that both teachers and
students would help themselves in helping them. Finally, chiefly
through the efforts of Mrs. Washington, a model country school was
established in the district adjoining the Institute's property. This
school is a farm home where the young teacher and his wife, both
graduates of Tuskegee, teach the boys and girls who come to them each
day how to live on a farm--teach them by practice and object-lesson as
well as by precept. They follow the ordinary country school
curriculum, but that is a small and relatively unimportant part of
what this school gives its pupils. Then, too, the teachers of Tuskegee
early started campaigns looking to the extending of the school terms
throughout Macon County and the adjoining counties from three to five
months, as was customary, to nine months.

And this work of Tuskegee beyond its own borders grew as constantly in
volume and extent as the work within its borders, so that Tuskegee
soon became the vital force--the yeast that was raising the level of
life and well-being throughout, first, the town and neighborhood of
Tuskegee, then the County of Macon, then the surrounding counties and
the State of Alabama; and finally, in conjunction with its mother,
Hampton, and its children situated at strategic points throughout the
South, the entire Negro people of the South, and indirectly the whole
nation.

And as the school grew, so grew the man whose life was its embodiment.
It is impossible to think of Booker Washington and Tuskegee
separately. Just as he typified Tuskegee, so Tuskegee typified him.
Just as he made the school, so the school made him. His influence,
like that of his school, was at first community wide, then county
wide, then State wide, and finally nation wide.

CHAPTER TWO

LEADER OF HIS RACE

In 1895, fourteen years after the founding of Tuskegee Institute,
Booker T. Washington was selected to represent his race at the opening
of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.
On this occasion he mounted the platform, to make the first address
which any member of his race had ever made before any representative
body of Southern men and women, as an obscure but worthy young colored
man who had commended him