The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.3, page 281, Jan. 1893, U. of Illinois Press

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JANUARY · I 893 anxious are the masses for education that we have been compelled to refuse this year admission to nearly 500 for want of room and means. At Tuskegee as in most, if not all, of your schools in connection with the mental and religious training we have industrial work. Through the industrial system three ends are sought: First to give the students an opportunity to work out a portion of their board bills. Very soon after beginning the work at Tuskegee, we found that few of those who came were able to pay in cash the $8. per month charged for board and remain during the g months session, so we started the practice of giving them an opportunity to work out about $3 of the $8, and they are able, as a rule, to pay the remainder in cash and remain during the session. Second: The school furnishes labor that is of value to the institution and gives the students an opportunity at the same time to learn something from the labor within itself. We have just completed a three-story brick building. For this building our young men made the bricks at our brick yard, did the brick-masonry, plastering, painting, tinning, carpentry, and the sawing and planing of much of the lumber. While the young men do that kind of work, the girls make and launder their clothing and are thus taught sewing and laundering. In the end the institution has the building for permanent use and the students, the knowledge of the trades connected with the completion of such a building. At the head of each industry there is a competent teacher so that the students not only do the work but get hold of the principles and practice at the same time. On this plan 400 acres of land have been cultivated the past year. This plan runs through all our ~4 industries. Then we make the industrial system valuable in teaching and emphasizing the dignity of labor and in giving moral back-bone—ire teaching that labor neither hurts nor disgraces anyone to use his hands in any manner found necessary and I might add in passing that the idea of manual labor being disgraceful is not in any sense original with the colored people down in the South. (Anxiety for trades Do not give in full value of taxable property Heresy trials. ~ Thus, during these ten years, there has been built up at Tuskegee, almost wholly by the labor of the students friends in the North giving the money to buy land and the material which we could not 2