there not something else I can do for you? Can I not stay a
little later, and help you?'

"Moreover, it is with a race as it is with an individual: it must
respect itself if it would win the respect of others. There must
be a certain amount of unity about a race, there must be a great
amount of pride about a race, there must be a great deal of faith
on the part of a race in itself. An individual cannot succeed
unless he has about him a certain amount of pride,--enough pride
to make him aspire to the highest and best things in life. An
individual cannot succeed unless that individual has a great
amount of faith in himself.

"A person who goes at an undertaking with the feeling that he
cannot succeed is likely to fail. On the other hand, the
individual who goes at an undertaking, feeling that he can
succeed, is the individual who in nine cases out of ten does
succeed. But, whenever you find an individual that is ashamed of
his race, trying to get away from his race, apologising for being
a member of his race, then you find a weak individual. Where you
find a race that is ashamed of itself, that is apologising for
itself, there you will find a weak, vacillating race. Let us no
longer have to apologise for our race in these or other matters.
Let us think seriously and work seriously: then, as a race, we
shall be thought of seriously, and, therefore, seriously
respected."

CHAPTER V.

In this chapter I wish to show how, at Tuskegee, we are trying to work
out the plan of industrial training, and trust I shall be pardoned the
seeming egotism if I preface the sketch with a few words, by way of
example, as to the expansion of my own life and how I came to
undertake the work at Tuskegee.

My earliest recollection is of a small one-room log hut on a slave
plantation in Virginia. After the close of the war, while working in
the coal mines of West Virginia for the support of my mother, I heard,
in some accidental way, of the Hampton Institute. When I learned that
it was an institution where a black boy could study, could have a
chance to work for his board, and at the same time be taught how to
work and to realise the dignity of labor, I resolved to go there.
Bidding my mother good-by, I started out one morning to find my way
to Hampton, although I was almost penniless and had no definite idea
as to w