women. The fourteen hundred and over young men and women who attended the
school during the last school year received instruction--in addition to
academic and religious training--in thirty-three trades and industries,
including carpentry, blacksmithing, printing, wheelwrighting
harnessmaking, painting, machinery, founding, shoemaking, brickmasonry and
brickmaking, plastering, sawmilling, tinsmithing, tailoring, mechanical
and architectural drawing, electrical and steam engineering, canning,
sewing, dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundering, housekeeping,
mattress making, basketry, nursing, agriculture, dairying and stock
raising, horticulture.

Not only do the students receive instruction in these trades, but they do
actual work, by means of which more than half of them pay some part or all
of their expenses while remaining at the school. Of the sixty buildings
belonging to the school all but four were almost wholly erected by the
students as a part of their industrial education. Even the bricks which go
into the walls are made by students in the school's brick yard, in which,
last year, they manufactured two million bricks.

When we first began this work at Tuskegee, and the idea got spread among
the people of my race that the students who came to the Tuskegee school
were to be taught industries in connection with their academic studies,
were, in other words, to be taught to work, I received a great many verbal
messages and letters from parents informing me that they wanted their
children taught books, but not how to work. This protest went on for three
or four years, but I am glad to be able to say now that our people have
very generally been educated to a point where they see their own needs and
conditions so clearly that it has been several years since we have had a
single protest from parents against the teaching of industries, and there
is now a positive enthusiasm for it. In fact, public sentiment among the