the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and in securing the
money necessary for the support of the institution. Much of what
I have said has been written on board trains, or at hotels or
railroad stations while I have been waiting for trains, or during
the moments that I could spare from my work while at Tuskegee.
Without the painstaking and generous assistance of Mr. Max
Bennett Thrasher I could not have succeeded in any satisfactory
degree.



Introduction

The details of Mr. Washington's early life, as frankly set down
in "Up from Slavery," do not give quite a whole view of his
education. He had the training that a coloured youth receives at
Hampton, which, indeed, the autobiography does explain. But the
reader does not get his intellectual pedigree, for Mr. Washington
himself, perhaps, does not as clearly understand it as another
man might. The truth is he had a training during the most
impressionable period of his life that was very extraordinary,
such a training as few men of his generation have had. To see its
full meaning one must start in the Hawaiian Islands half a
century or more ago.* There Samuel Armstrong, a youth of
missionary parents, earned enough money to pay his expenses at an
American college. Equipped with this small sum and the
earnestness that the undertaking implied, he came to Williams
College when Dr. Mark Hopkins was president. Williams College had
many good things for youth in that day, as it has in this, but
the greatest was the strong personality of its famous president.