Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/528

 went into the room and inspected the floor and closets; then she took her handkerchief and rubbed it on the woodwork about the walls, and over the table and benches. When she was unable to find one bit of dirt on the floor, or a particle of dust on any of the furniture, she quietly remarked, "I guess you will do to enter this institution." …

The sweeping of that room was my college examination. … I have passed several examinations since then, but I have always felt that this was the best one I ever passed…

After graduating from Hampton Institute, Booker Washington was sent by Gen. Armstrong, Principal of Hampton, to the little town of Tuskegee, Alabama, and there in 1881 he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, of which he has ever since been the head. Starting there in 1881, as he said, in a little negro church "with thirty pupils, one teacher, and no property but a blind mule," this school has grown in numbers, property, and influence until to-day it has, large and small, upwards of one hundred buildings, two hundred teachers and helpers, twenty-four hundred acres of land, and something like sixteen hundred pupils.

The people to whom Booker Washington told this story were back country people; some of them "poor whites" who had themselves obtained little or no education, all of them persons who shared the prejudices of Southern people in regard to the education of the negro. But as he proceeded in his simple, direct way with the story of his own struggle; as he set forth the plain and practical plan of the education he had tried to give his students and, finally, as he described in convincing detail, the results of this education upon the pupils themselves, and upon the communities in which they lived, I think we were all profoundly impressed. It was a lesson in civilization, and I believe we all saw, as we had not seen before, the part that the school had played and was destined to play in the solution of the race problem, and perhaps, also, of some other problems which have not prospered under the ministrations of politicians and the influences of party politics.

It was not until 1895 that Booker Washington began to assume the proportions of a national figure. Up to that time