Washington speaks to students on campus in the early 1900s
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t wasn’t too terribly long ago, as decades go, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that Dr. Booker T. Washington would ride up to a dusty section of Alabama farmland. Getting down from his horse, he would talk about the benefits of education for black farmers - preaching practical applications of farming, home economics and personal health. His inspirational words were broadcast like seeds, and they fell on fertile ground. The former slave, who had worked his way through Hampton Institute in Virginia, had been chosen to lead Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Ala. With his new post, he wanted to take an “extension service” classroom to farmers to stem the tide of poverty in the post-Civil War South. According to Dr. Dana Chandler, chief archivist of present-day Tuskegee University,
Washington was compelled to go out and help black farmers “take what they had and make more of it.” Washington’s words resounded from a mobile educational platform called the “Jesup Agricultural Wagon,” a horse-drawn wagon named after New York financier and philanthropist Morris K. Jesup, with the help of another Tuskegee Institute notable, Dr. George Washington Carver. The movable school, officially launched in 1906, brought education to Alabama farmers. That first summer, the wagon program reached about 2,000 people every month. Washington’s advocacy spurred wealthy whites in the North to donate to the project, and by 1930 “The Booker T. Washington Agricultural School on Wheels” carried a home demonstrations agent, agricultural agent and architect. The road-worn wagon became a truck.
Washington convinced some of the richest and most powerful businessmen… to help fund his vision. Alabama Living | JULY 2011 |
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