f every worth-while
educational institution, it is to a peculiar degree the aim and the
achievement of Tuskegee. The ten million Negroes in the United States
need trained leaders of their own race more than they need anything
else. Whatever else they should or should not have these leaders must
have character. Since Tuskegee is the largest of the educational
institutions for Negroes, with the man at its head who was commonly
recognized as the leader of leaders in his race, naturally the
heaviest responsibility in the training of these leaders fell, and
will continue to fall, upon Tuskegee. Consequently the task at
Tuskegee is not so much to educate so many thousands of young men and
women as to train as many leaders for the Negro people as can possibly
be done and done well within a given space of time. These Tuskegee
graduates lead by the power of example and not by agitation. One runs
a farm and achieves so much more success than his neighbors, through
his better methods, that they gradually adopt these methods and with
his help apply them to their own conditions. Another teaches a country
school and does it so much better than the average country school
teacher that his or her school comes to be regarded as a model to be
emulated by the other schools of the locality. When a Tuskegee girl
marries and settles in a community she keeps her house so much cleaner
and in every way more attractive than the rank and file of her
neighbors that gradually her house and her methods of housekeeping
become the standard for the neighborhood. There is, however, nothing
of the "holier than thou" or the complaisant about the true Tuskegee
graduate and neither is there anything monopolistic. They have had the
idea of service thoroughly drilled into their consciousness--the idea
that their advantages of education are, as it were, a trust which they
are to administer for the benefit of those who have not had such
advantages.

Now such leaders as these must not only be provided if the so-called
race problem is to be solved, but they must be provided speedily. In
every community in which the black people are ignorant and vicious and
without trained leaders among themselves they are likely at any time
to come into conflict with the dominant race, and every such conflict
engenders bitterness on both sides and makes just so much more
difficult the final solution of the race problem. This is why Booker
Washington labored so incessantly to incr