Change Without Revolution

On the tidy, tree-studded campus of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute this week, Negroes and whites (including Alabama's governor) will honor a onetime slave who was once traded by his master for a broken-down race horse. Shy, shuffling George Washington Carver, who died in 1943, had spent a lifetime performing scientific miracles. In his tiny laboratory, which he equipped from a rubbish heap on the campus, he had created hundreds of industrial products out of the common stuff--clay, peanuts, potatoes--he found about him.

For the occasion, Tuskegee will auction off the first issue of the George Washington Carver postage stamp. It was only the second time a Negro's face had appeared on a U.S. stamp, and the first one was also a Tuskegee man: ex-Slave Booker T. Washington, who opened Tuskegee 67 years ago.

Tuskegee planned the ceremony to launch a $2,000,000 endowment campaign for its famed science research center, the Carver Foundation; now it needs $150,000 more to cope with a disaster. A month ago, many of the laboratories and most of the museum of the Carver Foundation, which Scientist Carver had built over the years, were destroyed by fire. Many of his exhibits and all but three of the 48 paintings he had left behind were gone, but Tuskegee plans to rebuild the Carver laboratories to carry on his work.

Sweetened Water & Peas. Carver and Washington were the brain and heart of Tuskegee. What is now a $10 million campus began with a shanty schoolhouse which leaked so badly that on rainy days Booker T. Washington had to keep his umbrella up while teaching. For weeks, he and his students lived on little more than sweetened water and black peas. The Negroes of the town could only help him a little. An old woman hobbled up to him one day and gave him all she had--six eggs. "Mr. Washington," she said, "I knows what you is tryin' to do."

His students were not so sure. They were often impatient with his insistence on first things first. Washington complained that they wanted to learn about cube roots before learning the multiplication tables. They talked glibly of having mastered "banking and discount," but most of them still ate with their fingers. He taught them how to wash, to brush their teeth, to plow and plant ("trained farmers are as much needed as trained teachers"), how to make bricks and shoe horses. Then he taught them how to read and write, and something of history and literature. It was his idea to turn out, not scholars or statesmen, but skilled technicians and prosperous farmers. "No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world," he once wrote, "is long in any degree ostracized."

Nursing & Flying. Once, during World War I, the Ku Klux Klan marched on Tuskegee, but turned away before it got there. Otherwise, Tuskegee has had no unpleasant incidents. Its relations with the nearby town of Tuskegee, where whites are outnumbered two to one, are cordial though not intimate. Tuskegee is the only private school regularly to receive funds from the Alabama legislature (it got $235,000 last year). The top Negro agricultural and mechanical college in the U.S., it still teaches brickmaking and planting, but also nursing and flying; the Carver Foundation receives grants from industries all over the U.S. for research on animal nutrition, new inks, paper, and drugs.

Now, under its third president, big, bluff Frederick Douglass Patterson, a northern Negro, it is constantly expanding (it is building, among other things, a new $300,000 veterinary medicine school), but not basically changing its ways. More aggressive Negro educators often scorn Tuskegee's insistence on training technicians instead of leaders. Says President Patterson: "When we think of the next ten years, we must think in terms of what we can reasonably achieve. I do not want change by revolution." He shares Booker T. Washington's credo for his people : "The great human law that in the end recognizes and rewards merit is everlasting and universal."

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