insight into the work that the American Missionary Association is doing,
I will gladly consent. My story is the story of hundreds of young men in
the South. Only in the larger cities can we get a good English
education, except we go to schools established for us by this
Association. I went eight years to Fisk University. I have a brother
there now in the senior college class. This is his tenth year, and I
have a sister who is also in her tenth year there. It takes a long while
to get through. My father had no money to send me to school. In his
slavery days he had stolen a little bit of learning, and had learned how
to write and read and a little arithmetic. I was about four years old
when the stroke for freedom was made. My father began to teach me
arithmetic, and many a day in his shoemaker's shop, as I sat and kept
the fire going, he would teach me and carry me as far as he could; and
he put into me the idea of getting an education. At fifteen he told me I
might have my own time. At that age I had advanced far enough to pass
the examination of the district school, and, having passed, I made my
way to Fisk University. I had not known that there was such an
institution in the land, or such a thing as the Missionary Association;
but going once into an adjoining county, I happened to fall in with some
Christian young men from Fisk, and they told me about that school. I had
always had a great desire to be educated, and so I went down there. When
I arrived there, I thought it was a strange place. I was familiar with
white people, but I think I had never up to that time had one of them
shake hands with me. When I found what they were doing there, and that
it was an earnest Christian school, my whole soul was uplifted, and I
determined to seek for better things. I thought I was pretty well
educated, but when I found myself down stairs among those learning
grammar and arithmetic, and that there were nine years before me, I
concluded that after all I was not very well educated, but I set out to
go through that long course of study.