Booker T. Washington: “Most of you are going out from Tuskegee sooner or later to exert your influence in the home life of our people.”

Until that question was asked it had never occurred to me that there was no period of my life that was devoted to play.

The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.

Despite this disappointment, however, I determined that I would learn something, anyway.