ans of raising up and
dignifying labor and thus indirectly a means of raising up and
dignifying the common and ordinary man. It has been necessary to teach
the masses of the people that the way to build up a race is to begin
at the bottom and not at the top, to lift the man furthest down, and
thus raise the whole structure of society above him. On the other
hand, it has been necessary to demonstrate to the white man in the
South that education does not 'spoil' the Negro, as it has been so
often predicted that it would. It was necessary to make him actually
see that education makes the Negro not an idler or spendthrift, but a
more industrious, thrifty, law-abiding, and useful citizen than he
otherwise would be."

The commencement exercises which we have described are one of the
numerous means evolved by Booker Washington to guide the masses of his
own people, as well as the Southern whites, to a true conception of
the value and meaning of real education for the Negro.

The correlation between the work of farm, shop, and classroom, first
applied by General Armstrong at Hampton, was developed on an even
larger scale by his one-time student, Booker Washington. The students
at Tuskegee are divided into two groups: the day students who work in
the classroom half the week and the other half on the farm and in the
shops, and the night students who work all day on the farm or in the
shops and then attend school at night. The day school students pay a
small fee in cash toward their expenses, while the night school
students not only pay no fee but by good and diligent work gradually
accumulate a credit at the school bank which, when it becomes
sufficiently large, enables them to become day school students. In
fact, the great majority of the day students have thus fought their
way in from the night school. But all students of both groups thus
receive in the course of a week a fairly even balance between theory
and practice.

[Illustration: An academic class. A problem in brick masonry. Mr.
Washington always insisted upon correlation; that is, drawing the
problem from the various shops and laboratories.]

In a corner of each of the shops, in which are carried on the forty or
more different trades, is a blackboard on which are worked out the
actual problems which arise in the course of the work. After school
hours one always finds in the shops a certain number of the teachers
from the Academic Department looking up problems for