The plan itself is not a new one.  It was worked out at Hampton Institute, but it was done at Hampton by white men.  The plan had, in fact, been many times theoretically laid down by thoughtful students of Southern life.  Handicrafts were taught in the days of slavery on most well-managed plantations.  But Tuskegee is, nevertheless, a brand-new chapter in the history of the Negro, and in the history of the knottiest problem we have ever faced.  It not only makes “a carpenter of a man; it makes a man of a carpenter.”  In one sense, therefore, it is of greater value than any other institution for the training of men and women that we have, from Cambridge to Palo Alto.  It is almost the only one of which it may be said that it points the way to a new epoch in a large area of our national life.

To work out the plan on paper, or at a distance—­that is one thing.  For a white man to work it out—­that too, is an easy thing.  For a coloured man to work it out in the South, where, in its constructive period, he was necessarily misunderstood by his own people as well as by the whites, and where he had to adjust it at every step to the strained race relations—­that is so very different and more difficult a thing that the man who did it put the country under lasting obligations to him.

It was not and is not a mere educational task.  Anybody could teach boys trades and give them an elementary education.  Such tasks have been done since the beginning of civilization.  But this task had to be done with the rawest of raw material, done within the civilization of the dominant race, and so done as not to run across race lines and social lines that are the strongest forces in the community.  It had to be done for the benefit of the whole community.  It had to be done, moreover, without local help, in the face of the direst poverty, done by begging, and done in spite of the ignorance of one race and the prejudice of the other.

No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more wisdom to do it right.  The true measure of Mr. Washington’s success is, then, not his teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, nor even gaining the support of philanthropic persons at a distance, but this—­that every Southern white man of character and of wisdom has been won to a cordial recognition of the value of the work, even men who held and still hold to the conviction that a mere book education for the Southern blacks under present conditions is a positive evil.  This is a demonstration of the efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like the demonstration of the value of democratic institutions themselves—­a demonstration made so clear in spite of the greatest odds that it is no longer open to argument.