What were we to
do? We had only the little old shanty and the abandoned church
which the good coloured people of the town of Tuskegee had kindly
loaned us for the accommodation of the classes. The number of
students was increasing daily. The more we saw of them, and the
more we travelled through the country districts, the more we saw
that our efforts were reaching, to only a partial degree, the
actual needs of the people whom we wanted to lift up through the
medium of the students whom we should education and send out as
leaders.
The more we talked with the students, who were then coming to us
from several parts of the state, the more we found that the chief
ambition among a large proportion of them was to get an education
so that they would not have to work any longer with their hands.
This is illustrated by a story told of a coloured man in Alabama,
who, one hot day in July, while he was at work in a cotton-field,
suddenly stopped, and, looking toward the skies, said: "O Lawd,
de cottom am so grassy, de work am so hard, and the sun am so hot
dat I b'lieve dis darky am called to preach!"
About three months after the opening of the school, and at the
time when we were in the greatest anxiety about our work, there
came into market for sale an old and abandoned plantation which
was situated about a mile from the town of Tuskegee.
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