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Tuskegee Institute

It was Emerson who said that institutions are the lengthened shadows of great men. Certainly Tuskegee Institute is the lengthened shadow of Booker Washington. Tuskegee and the Odyssey sing the triumph of personality over circumstance; each hero overcame men and gods and nature by dint of "cool intelligence, patient courage and a tenacious heart."

The cramped log cabin, windowless and squalid, with its gratuitous cat hole and its potato hole ready at hand—this cabin in which the unfathered child was born some unnoted day, the bundle of filthy rags laid upon a dirt floor on which the two little brothers and the little sister slept, the wonderful grape-vine telegraph, the delectable ginger cakes ("Those cakes," says Washington, "seemed to me absolutely the most tempting and desirable things I had ever seen."—), the cruel wooden shoes, the ordeal of the flax shirt, the heart-felt sorrow for "Mars Billy" killed in battle, the profound yearning for freedom of which many a plaintive melody was the voice, the wild immeasurable

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