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Another most interesting character whom I always meet on my tours North is Mr. Frank P. Chisholm, Financial Secretary of Tuskegee Institute. I have been knowing Mr. Chisholm for a great many years. We have attended the Summer School at Harvard several summers together and it has been both a pleasure and benefit to me to be associated with him in this way.
And the reason we do not have such schools is because we have not yet evolved men big enough as teachers to couple business and books. The men who can make money can't teach, and those who can teach can't make money. The man of the future will do both. Tuskegee has no servants, no menials, and employs no laborers. The work of housing and feeding two thousand persons is all student labor.
Twice during the evening the Duchess sought us out for a conversation, and she asked me to write her when we got home, and tell her more about the work at Tuskegee. This I did. When Christmas came we were surprised and delighted to receive her photograph with her autograph on it. The correspondence has continued, and we now feel that in the Duchess of Sutherland we have one of our warmest friends.
This was kept up on every street on to which I went, to an extent which embarrassed me so much that I went back to my boarding-place. The next morning I returned to Tuskegee. At the station in Atlanta, and at almost all of the stations at which the train stopped between that city and Tuskegee, I found a crowd of people anxious to shake hands with me.
She came nearer and spitefully shook a finger in my face. "Why won't Negroes work!" she panted. "I have given money for years to Hampton and Tuskegee and yet I can't get decent servants. They won't try. They're lazy! They're unreliable! They're impudent and they leave without notice. "God forbid!"
The work done at Hampton, at Tuskegee, and at the many schools on a similar basis which have since sprung up in the Southern States, has not only demonstrated that the negro race may be made to become a source of vast good or profit to the Republic, it has revolutionised public opinion.
Hampton and Tuskegee, striving along common lines for common ends, intimate in relationship, interdependent, each frankly criticizing and freely advising, each profiting by the failures of the other, each benefiting by the successes of the other, are both working as best they may toward that "far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves."
The problem that the Tuskegee Institute keeps before itself constantly is how to prepare these leaders. From the outset, in connection with religious and academic training, it has emphasised industrial, or hand, training as a means of finding the way out of present conditions.
I got as far as Washington, D. C., and saw the Inauguration of President McKinley, and then I returned home. The following June Dr. Washington wrote me to come to Tuskegee so as to accompany the Tuskegee Quartet North that summer. It must not be understood that I was one of the singers; that was not my good fortune.
Robert C. Bedford, who is now, as he has been for many years, secretary of the board of trustees of the Tuskegee Institute, and who travels among and reports upon the work of Tuskegee graduates and former students, but who was at that time pastor of the First Congregational Church in Montgomery.
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