Page:The New Negro.pdf/371

Rh tion for themselves and to create by their own efforts that new and better order of things which it had been vainly hoped would come from the hands of others.

Hampton was the pioneer in this movement. Down in the Tidewater section, General Armstrong at the close of the Civil War took refugees that had gathered from the plantations of that section and began the solution of their problems by teaching them to work with their hands while they trained their minds, and developed the fundamental attributes of industry, thrift, self-reliance and self-respect. He worked, of course, with those who came to him, establishing a school to combine labor with books in the process of education; developing the head, the hand and the heart at the same time. But he did not stop there. He reached out to the homes and communities from which his students came and set up there for fathers and mothers the same standards and ideals of home surroundings and character development that he was creating for the young men and women who came to him as students. Home and community became the ultimate objectives of his labors. Boys and girls that came to him as students were impressed with the idea that their training was not merely for their individual success, but rather that they should be positive factors in improving life and conditions wherever they might locate.

Of all who came to him, the one pupil most apt to catch this vision was Booker T. Washington. Out he went from Hampton to translate his inspiration into deeds. Called to Alabama to take charge of a projected school, he immediately set himself to work out in terms of local conditions the ideas that were instilled in him at Hampton. From the very beginning he conceived of the whole South as his schoolroom and the entire Negro race as his class. The one subject which he taught was life. Arithmetic, reading, geography, history, were all interpreted in terms of the life surroundings of his students. He talked of the life they lived. Every day he put them to work creating life for themselves, building their own buildings, making their own tools, producing their own food, making their own clothes and in a hundred other ways supplying their own needs. These were the things they talked about in their class-