There is one place in the hill country of Nothern Alabama where the last census-taker must have received something of a shock. Instead of a one-room log cabin he found, at a place called Kowaliga, a well-constructed frame building of three stories, with several neat white outbuildings, all plainly devoted to the teaching of the young. But his surprise must have been still greater when he discovered that this was a school for colored children. Not only did he find in this little colony between one hundred and fifty and two hundred children under the instruction of six teachers, nearly all college graduates, but he was informed that the school undertakes to board a dozen pupils of each sex, that they may come directly under the influence of the teachers, and that the girls may be trained in housework and the rudiments of domestic science, and that the institution not only aims to give its pupils a good common-school education, but to train them to use their hands in the workshop and in the fields, for which purpose it gives limited instruction in manual training and plenty of experience in tilling the land.

"Doubtless a branch of Tuskegee," the reader will say. Yes and no. That Mr. Booker T. Washington's influence has penetrated to Kowaliga goes without saying. Wherever there are intelligent negroes there will be found some knowledge of Mr. Washington's teachings and ideals. Mr. Washington, too, was for some time trustee of the Kowaliga Institute, as this struggling school is called. But it owes its inception and development to a father and his son. The former is John J. Benson, born a slave, who by his own efforts has come "up from slavery" until he is to-day the most influential colored man in his county, and one who has the respect and confidence of his county, and one who had the respect and confidence of his white neighbors. He has not only acquired by ceaseless industry the acres which he helped to till for his old master when in bondage, but has added to them, has built himself an excellent house and a sawmill, and has become known throughout his county as the foremost of his race. It is but natural that a man of this type should give his children the best possible education he could afford. But he has done more than that,—he has instilled into his children an intense desire to better the conditions of their race in the country round about their home. To William E. Benson, his son, who is guided by this fine altruistic spirit, is largely due the existence of the Kowaliga Institute. In its growth he finds abundant reward for his unselfish labors.

Returning, in 1896, from his college course, William E. Benson succeeded in arousing seventy farmers of the Kowaliga neighborhood to a realization of the educational needs of the community, and these poor, hard-working tillers of the soil gave freely of their limited means and time toward the school's first building, called Patron's Hall. They cut down the trees given them by an interested white neighbor and carted them to the senior Benson's mill, where they were transformed into boards and shingles, for Kowaliga has been no foreign growth grafted upon the community, but was conceived and created by its founders without white inspiration or aid until it was well under way. While their fathers toiled on the building some of the farm boys formed a glee club and fairly sang $300 into the school's treasury. Then the American Missionary Association became interested in this plucky effort to let the light of education shine into the darkness of one of the most ignorant communities of the South, and through its support, and the Northern trips for help of young Mr. Benson, the school now has land and property valued at $10,000,—ten acres of the land on which the school stands being the gift of the man who has worked himself up from slavery into prosperity. This summer has seen still another evidence of the best kind of a commercial spirit, for some of the farmers, under the Benson leadership, have paid for their children's tuition by lending their time and strength to the erection of a boy's dormitory, which shall also contain additional and much-needed class-rooms.

And as the school has grown materially, so it has developed along educational lines. Not, of course, without making the mistakes inevitable in such an enterprise, but always seeing more clearly the needs of the surrounding country. It has begun to draw pupils from Georgia and Alabama, and from a far larger section than that surrounding Kowaliga and its neighboring hamlets. The school term has been extended from three to eight months, and by absorbing three district schools the Institute receives the state aid which would have been paid to them. "Its situation in the heart of an agricultural region," says Mr. Benson, "makes it the hope of hundreds, if not thousands, of boys and girls who cannot expect to go to Hampton or Tuskegee,—indeed, have never heard of these places." In place of the ignorant "Jack-leg" district schoolmaster, there are refined men and women who know something of the science of teaching in addition to mere book learning, and who, from the principal, Mr. C. W. Driskell, down, are persuaded that agricultural training is the principal need of the hour in this region.

Kowaliga is a non-sectarian school, and adapts its curriculum to the needs of the neighborhood. Thorough instruction is given in the grammar grade, but on practical farming, the care of live stock, and on the elements of manual training the main stress is laid with the boys. Cooking, sewing, laundry work, housekeeping, and the care of poultry and the garden are part of the girls' course. Naturally, a community of such limited opportunities cannot afford to support an institution as large as this. The state contributes less than three hundred dollars, the American Missionary Association four hundred dollars. The rest of the money necessary comes from tuition fees and from friends in the North, and further aid is urgently desired.

No one can see all this growth, as the writer has done, and not marvel at the change which, in a few years, has been brought about in this community by the school, or be other than deeply impressed with the utility of this attempt at self-help. It is distinctly a type of the negro school that is certain to spring up all over the South as more and more graduates of Hampton and Tuskegee go back to their one-room cabins and help to transform them into clean and respectable frame dwellings, as is being done at Kowaliga. Education brings with it a desire for better methods of living, and the Bensons, not content to let the school absorb all their efforts to uplift their race, have founded a land company, whose special object is home-building and the development of the negro farmer. With such an advance will go much of the picturesqueness of the present crude methods of living, but it means better and more prosperous citizens and more valuable neighbors.

From an article by Oswald Garrison Villard.
In Review of Reviews.