Golden Tuskegee

A great fat-pine bonfire crackled and shone one night last week at the railroad station of Tuskegee, Ala. With dark faces shining, 1,600 students of Tuskegee Institute cheered, hollered and sang Hallelujah as two special cars brought trustees, alumni & friends to celebrate Tuskegee's Golden Jubilee. Came Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, Chairman William Jay Schieffelin of Tuskegee's board of trustees, Canon Anson Phelps Stokes of Washington Cathedral, Manhattan Banker Paul Moritz Warburg, and representatives of 24 Governors. President Hoover was to speak to them over the radio, on "Race Relations."

It was 50 years since Booker Taliaferro Washington, with a shanty, a church, a teacher and 30 students, founded an institution to minister to the Negro's greatest needs: industrial training, agricultural development, inter-racial goodwill. Tuskegee now has 2,000 acres of land, 120 buildings valued at $2,000,000, an endowment of nearly $8,000,000. There is no white man among its 270 teachers and 3,600 students enrolled in high school, college and summer school courses. Because Dr. Washington wished to "put brains and skill into the common occupations of life," Tuskegee has remained an industrial school. It now teaches 42 trades as well as agriculture, home economics, and the academic and religious courses.

Tuskegee's work goes far beyond its campus. Among institutions it has sponsored are an annual conference of Negro farmers, the National Negro Business League, National Negro Health Week. It launched the farm demonstration service, now taken over by the U. S. Government. A truck goes through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi carrying instructors who teach the Negro farmer how to improve his farm, his wife how to manage the farmhouse. Tuskegee attempts to better the quality of local livestock: it will swap a pedigreed cow, chicken, hog with a farmer, take in exchange his meaner stock for its larder. Tuskegee sponsors the only clinic in the U. S. where Negro doctors may meet and discuss their special problems; last week 300 Negro physicians & surgeons attended the annual meeting.

Tuskegee has succeeded in training its men to serve the communities in which they were born. Of its 20.000 graduates, 75% have remained in the South. About half of the remaining 25% originally came out of the North, returned there after graduation. Tuskegee estimates that 35% of its graduates go into teaching, 30% into industry, 20% into "homemaking," 12% into business, 3%, into the professions. Dr. Robert Russa Moton, principal of Tuskegee Institute, says proudly: "From this we gather that 80% of our graduates are pursuing the line of work in which they were trained." Graduates whom his Institute views with satisfaction include: William Henry Holtzclaw (born in Roanoke, Ala.), founder and principal of Utica Normal and Industrial School at Utica, Miss.; James G. Carter (born in Brunswick, Ga.), U. S. Consul in Calais, France; C. C. Alleyne (born in the West Indies), Bishop of the New York district of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; Thomas M. Campbell, who received last January one of the Harmon awards ($400 and a gold medal) in Farming & Rural Life.

Tall, deep-voiced, grey-wooled Dr. Moton was Dr. Washington's successor at Tuskegee, and like him a graduate of Hampton Institute at Hampton, Va. Ever since he was called to Tuskegee at Dr. Washington's death in 1915 he has de voted himself dynamically to its advancement. Though many Negro leaders be lieve that the salvation of their race is not to be found by such purely industrial training as Tuskegee offers, all recognize Dr. Moton as one of their great leaders, a potent contact-man between the Negro and the White. Last week Dr. Meredith Ashby Jones, white Baptist pastor from St. Louis, whose father was chaplain to General Robert Edward Lee, said: "Moton is the perfect incarnation in his personality of the ideal and dream of this re public, that the day shall come when all races and all castes and all classes rep resented in our country shall indeed have a fair chance to achieve the best in life."

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