The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 203, May 1882, U. of Illinois Press

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MAY· 1882 Two News Items from the Springfield Daily Republican Hi. 1 [Springfield, Mass., May 8, 1882] .` A COLORED MAN S EXPERIENCE AMONG HIS OWN PEOPLE B. T. Washington, principal of the Alabama colored normal school, talked instructively at the Memorial church last night and answered a number of questions about his work. The school began with a small number of pupils last .July and over loo had been gathered in when the session closed in March. The state appropriated $cooo for the payment of teachers' salaries, as an experiment, but made no provisions for buildings or apparatus. During the year the principal has paid for a farm, and is now at work securing $4200 for a substantial school building, a part of this sum having been pledged at the North and South. He and his three assistants, who are also Hampton graduates, have been kindly received by their white neighbors, and there is a good prospect that the appropriation for the school will be increased by the Legislature this year. It is located in the heart of the state, and there is an ignorant colored population within a radius of ~ 5 miles. The colored people of Alabama have very little to 'do with politics, not more than half of them voting. Most of them are kept poor by the mortgage system, which uses up a good part of the crop before it is harvested, because of the local merchants' lien on it for provisions advanced.' The majority of colored teachers now in service are very ignorant, as are the poor-whites who also teach in the colored schools, and they get their certificates through the county superintendents, who are usually merchants, by promising to trade at their stores. One of the points made by the speaker was that the northern people who help the cause of negro education at the South are sure to benefit the white population of that section. In the county where he lives the people secured local option by petitioning the Legislature for a special act for their' benefit, and as a consequence no liquor has been legally sold there this yearn In general the country colored people are not nearly as intemperate as those who dwell in cities. Mr. Washington is confident that the colored people have a better chance for advancement at the South than at the North, because the competition in all occupations is not so close. He finds that those who live In Alabama are lacking in ambition as com203