Another thing that has been insisted upon at the school is the use of the tooth-brush.  “The gospel of the tooth-brush,” as General Armstrong used to call it, is part of our creed at Tuskegee.  No student is permitted to retain who does not keep and use a tooth-brush.  Several times, in recent years, students have come to us who brought with them almost no other article except a tooth-brush.  They had heard from the lips of other students about our insisting upon the use of this, and so, to make a good impression, they brought at least a tooth-brush with them.  I remember that one morning, not long ago, I went with the lady principal on her usual morning tour of inspection of the girls’ rooms.  We found one room that contained three girls who had recently arrived at the school.  When I asked them if they had tooth-brushes, one of the girls replied, pointing to a brush:  “Yes, sir.  That is our brush.  We bought it together, yesterday.”  It did not take them long to learn a different lesson.

It has been interesting to note the effect that the use of the tooth-brush has had in bringing about a higher degree of civilization among the students.  With few exceptions, I have noticed that, if we can get a student to the point where, when the first or second tooth-brush disappears, he of his own motion buys another, I have not been disappointed in the future of that individual.  Absolute cleanliness of the body has been insisted upon from the first.  The students have been taught to bathe as regularly as to take their meals.  This lesson we began teaching before we had anything in the shape of a bath-house.  Most of the students came from plantation districts, and often we had to teach them how to sleep at night; that is, whether between the two sheets—­after we got to the point where we could provide them two sheets—­or under both of them.  Naturally I found it difficult to teach them to sleep between two sheets when we were able to supply but one.  The importance of the use of the night-gown received the same attention.

For a long time one of the most difficult tasks was to teach the students that all the buttons were to be kept on their clothes, and that there must be no torn places or grease-spots.  This lesson, I am pleased to be able to say, has been so thoroughly learned and so faithfully handed down from year to year by one set of students to another that often at the present time, when the students march out of the chapel in the evening and their dress is inspected, as it is every night, not one button is found to be missing.

Chapter XII.  Raising Money

When we opened our boarding department, we provided rooms in the attic of Porter Hall, our first building, for a number of girls.  But the number of students, of both sexes, continued to increase.  We could find rooms outside the school grounds for many of the young men, but the girls we did not care to expose in this way.  Very soon the problem of providing more rooms for the girls, as well as a larger boarding department for all the students, grew serious.  As a result, we finally decided to undertake the construction of a still larger building—­a building that would contain rooms for the girls and boarding accommodations for all.