Tuskegee's Third

Proudest Negro job in the world is the presidency of the institute which the late great Booker Taliaferro Washington founded at Tuskegee, Ala. in 1881. Tuskegee's two leaders, Dr. Washington and Dr. Robert Russa Moton, who succeeded him two decades ago, have done much to set the course of Negro education and culture in the U. S. They have had the friendly ear of tycoons, statesmen, a dozen Presidents. Again & again the heads of Tuskegee have spoken for their race.

For some years Tuskegee's trustees have known that a new president must soon be found. Dr. Moton, old (67) & ailing, announced he would retire in June 1935. Two years ago everyone believed that Dr. Russell C. Atkins, director of the Institute's Agricultural Department, was being groomed to succeed him. One night a Negro lunatic murdered Dr. Atkins. The trustees turned their thoughts to others: Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson of the Rosenwald Foundation; Channing Tobias, Y. M. C. A. worker; President Claude A. Barnett of the Associated Negro Press; Emmett Jay Scott, Secretary-Treasurer of Howard University. Once they offered the job to President Benjamin F. Hubert of Georgia State Industrial College but Dr. Hubert considered it "too big" for him.

Down to Tuskegee last fortnight went the Institute's trustees, led by their white chairman, William Jay Schieffelin of New York City. They hoped to persuade Dr. Moton to stay on but, if he refused, their minds were made up. He did refuse. Last week Tuskegee learned that Frederick Douglass Patterson, 34, would be its third president.

Born in the Anacostia section of Washington, Frederick Patterson was the last of four children. His father died when he was a few months old, his mother less than two years later. His sister Wilhelmina took him with her when she went to teach at Prairie View College, Tex. There, young "Pat" spent his time tagging after the football and baseball teams, getting his ears boxed for being a nuisance. Because he was a professor's brother, he could cut classes at will. When he studied, he studied hard, at agriculture and veterinary surgery. Later at Iowa State College, classmates found him a likeable but intensely serious young man who told many jokes without smiling. With an M. A. from Iowa, a Ph. D. from Cornell and two years of teaching experience at Virginia State College, "Pat" Patterson settled down at Tuskegee in 1930 as veterinarian and bacteriologist. When Dr. Atkins was murdered, he stepped up to the directorship of the Agricultural Department, biggest branch of the Institute. At 34, Frederick Douglass Patterson is still a serious young bachelor, with broad shoulders, greying hair and small mustache, who rises at 6 a. m., jogs twice around the Institute's quarter-mile track before breakfast. Students frequently find him lost in newspaper comics, which he thinks of great psychological value.

U. S. Negroes took a searching look last week at President-elect Patterson. Rich and famed though Tuskegee is, what the Negro Press calls "race men" are sharply divided on the merits of the vocational type of education it offers. Booker Washington founded the Institute "to put brains and skill into the common occupations of life." Raw, gangling black boys go to Tuskegee from all over the South. They work on and around the campus to pay for their keep and the small tuition: $31 for students in the high school department, $52 for those in the college. When they leave Tuskegee they know how to run a farm, lay bricks, print a newspaper, make a suit of clothes or cook a dinner. Few win fame as doctors, lawyers, clergymen.

Robert Russa Moton has built up Tuskegee's endowment from $2,000,000 to $10,000,000, its enrollment to 1,200. He has added an academic course of sorts. But Tuskegee is still what its founder made it. "I have managed," Dr. Moton tells friends, "to wobble around in Mr. Washington's shoes." Impartial Negroes deny that Dr. Moton has ever wobbled, agree that the imprint of the founder's shoes is stamped firmly on Tuskegee's 132 acre campus, its cornfields, cattle range, poultry yards, machine shops.

Many a Negro feels that Tuskegee's reliance on vocational training is a tacit admission of race inferiority. But to those who would like to see rich Tuskegee turn academic like Howard, Lincoln and Fisk, the election of Frederick Douglass Patterson gave no encouragement. More of a scholar than President Moton, Dr. Patterson is primarily an agriculturist and a veterinarian. Most Negroes concluded last week that Tuskegee will stay well within the Washington tradition.

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