Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/620

600 education for the negro. As might be expected, then, we find at Tuskegee practical hand training. The advantage is twofold. The students not only learn to work, but in doing so many are



enabled to work out all or a part of the expenses which otherwise in many cases would have prevented them from remaining at the school.

Of the thirty-eight buildings at Tuskegee, all but the first three, and these are among the smallest ones, have been built by the students. Several of the largest of these buildings are of brick, and the educational process begins in the institute's own brickyard, where a class of muscular young men are making bricks under the direction of a capable instructor, and in making them learn the trade which they expect to follow in after life, This yard not only makes all the bricks the institute uses, but many thousand more to be sold each year for use in the surrounding country.

I heard Mr. Washington tell to an audience of fifteen hundred negroes, in Charleston, South Carolina, a characteristic story of the beginning of this brickyard. "After I had been teaching a while at Tuskegee," he said, "I began to feel that I was partly throwing away my time teaching the students only books, without getting hold of them in their home life and without teaching them how to care for their bodies and how to work. I looked about for