Professor Booker T. Washington, whose aims, exertions and success tends to advance his race along the same lines as other races, is meeting with tremendous results, bringing about a more decided respect for the intelligence of Colored Americans. 55Mr. Washington, born in 1857, has, by grit and determination, reached the leadership of his race, and become one of the great men of the nation. 55 After a life spent in struggles to acquire an education, he was recognized as a great teacher, and called upon to take charge of a normal school at Tuskegee, Alabama, established by the legislature. He organized the school on July 4th, the anniversary of American Independence, an idea that denotes the character of the man. Since that period, the widely known Tuskegee Institute has made such progress that, today, the site of the institution is a city of itself. Mr. Washington worked his way to pay for his education at the Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. What he did and how he did it is best described by himself in giving his experiences at Hampton: SELF HELP FOR YOUTH “While at Hampton I resolved, if God permitted me to finish the course of study, I would enter the far South, the black belt of the Gulf States, and give my life in providing as best I could the same kind of chance or self-help for the youth of my race that I found ready for me when I went to Hampton, and, so, in 1881, I left Hampton and went to Tuskegee and started the Normal and Industrial Institute.” Mr. Washington literally worked his way through college. He helped unload a vessel to get money to reach Hampton, and while there did odd jobs of manual work, and acted as janitor. Referring to another American of another race, President Woodrow Wilson stands first, in reality he is the first gentleman in the land. PRESIDENT WILSON President Wilson is an uplifter rather than a reformer. When he sees things to be done to better the people, or to better anybody, for that matter, he does them and lets the reform take care of itself. He has always been a student, and a worker at fashioning brains 56as a teacher, professor, college president and at the head of a great university—Princeton, New Jersey.
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