also organized a farmers' conference and it is gratifying
indeed to see how hundreds of farmers, with their wives and children,
turn out seeking information, demonstration and co-operation. I have
been thus enabled to help my people here in North Carolina by giving
them the new truth and the new light and pointing them on to a better
way."

Waverley Turner Carmichael was born at Snow Hill, Ala., in 1888, and was
reared on the farm as all country negro boys are. All of his education
was obtained at the Snow Hill Institute except for six weeks he spent in
the Harvard Summer School last year.

[Illustration: GRADUATES OF SNOW HILL INSTITUTE

EMMANUEL MCDUFFIE. Principal Laurinburg Normal and Industrial
Institute, Laurinburg, N. C.

JOHN W. BRISTER, who established a prize at Snow Hill Institute.

REV. EMMANUEL M. BROWN of Street Manual Training School,
Richmond, Alabama.

WAVERLEY TURNER CARMICHAEL, Poet of Snow Hill.]

I had been deeply impressed with the poems which he had been writing for
several years, but as I was no judge of poems, I thought I would give
him a chance to bring his poems before those who could judge, so I
received for him a free scholarship at the Summer School at Harvard. He
read his poems to the class on several occasions and I had the
opportunity of hearing him several times. They had a deep impression
upon the class, so much so that his professor wrote the introduction to
his book in the following words:--

"When Waverley Carmichael, as a student in my summer class at Harvard,
brought me one day a modest sheaf of his poems, I felt that in him a
race had become or at least was becoming articulate. We have had, it is
true, sympathetic portrayals of Negro life and feeling from without; we
have had also the poems of Dunbar, significant of the high capabilities
of the Negro as he advances far along the way of civilization and
culture. The note which is sounded in this little volume is of another
sort. These humble and often imperfect utterances have sprung up
spontaneously from the soul of a primitive and untutored folk. The rich
emotion, the individual humor, the simple wisdom, the naive faith which
are its birthright, have here for the first time found voice. It is
sufficient to say of Waverley Carmichael that he is a full blooded
southern Negro, that until last summer he has never been away from his
native Alabama, that he has had but the most limited advantages of
education, and that h