tate of affairs, the condition of the people was
most miserable. This was due partly to poor crops and partly to bad
management on their part.

In many instances the tenants were not only unable to pay their debts,
but were also unable to pay their rents. In a few cases the landlords
had to provide, at their own expense, provisions for their tenants. This
was simply another way of establishing soup-houses on the plantations.
The idea of buying land was foreign to all of them, and there were not
more than twenty acres of land owned by the colored people in this whole
neighborhood. The churches and schools were practically closed, while
crime and immorality were rampant. The carrying of men and women to the
chain-gang was a frequent occurrence. Aside from all this, these people
believed that the end of education was to free their children from
manual labor rather than prepare them for more and better work. They
were very much opposed to industrial education. When the school was
started, many of the parents came to the school and forbade our
"working" their children, stating as their objection that their children
had been working all their lives, and they did not mean to send them to
school to learn to work. Not only did they forbid our having their
children work, but many took their children out of school rather than
have them do so. A good deal of this opposition was kept up by
illiterate preachers and incompetent teachers, here and there, who had
not had any particular training for their profession. In fact,
ninety-eight per cent of them had attended no school. We continued,
however, to keep the "industrial plank" in our platform, and year after
year some additional industry was added until we now have thirteen
industries in constant operation. Agriculture is the foremost and basic
industry of the institution. We do this because we are in a farming
section and ninety-five per cent of the people in this section depend
upon some form of agriculture for a livelihood. How changed are the
conditions now as regards our work! From the little one-room log cabin,
the school has grown so that it now owns 100 acres of land, 14
buildings, counting large and small, with property valued at $37,000.
From three students, it has grown so that we now have a school with more
than four hundred students annually in attendance, representing more
than a dozen Alabama counties and seven States. It has also grown from
one to twenty teachers and