Remarks at Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama.

Governor Dixon, Dr. Patterson and you, the students of Tuskegee:

Some of my more conservative friends in the north accuse me of being very persistent when I once make up my mind that a thing ought to be done for the good of humanity. They say that it is because I am part Scotch and part Dutch. I am afraid they are right. I try to be persistent and consistent.

I am fulfilling today a piece of persistency that began nearly thirty years ago when I had my first talk with Booker Washington. He asked me at that time to come to Tuskegee and see what he was doing and what his boys and girls were doing. I could not go then and I kept putting it off and then, for a good many years, Dr. Moton kept coming to see me, saying, "Why don't you come to visit us in Tuskegee?" I kept on saying, "Yes, I am going to come." And then Dr. Patterson in these later years has been saying, "Come and see us."

Well, I am persistent and consistent and here I am. I am proud to come to Tuskegee because I am proud of what Tuskegee has done. I wish that every American could come to Tuskegee and see what has been done. I do not know whether in any individual institution the members of that institution, the faculty and the students, realize how much they are being watched by the outside world. The things that they do in their institution count but, more than that, the things that their graduates do are things that count very greatly not only among the body of graduates, not only among their immediate neighbors but also throughout their State and throughout their Nation.

Your Congressman was telling me as we drove in here about a predecessor of his who had said that no graduate of Tuskegee had ever gone either to a penitentiary or to Congress.

As a matter of fact, because I travel around the country a good deal, I notice the graduates of Tuskegee more than some of you who are right here. I hear about a man or a woman, not only in the lower south but in the middle of the country and in the north, somebody who is making good, somebody who is having an influence over human service in his community. And then I hear that he or she is a graduate of Tuskegee and that is what counts.

I did not come here to make a formal address to you. This is a homely gathering. Tuskegee is a homey place. We think, necessarily and rightly, in terms of the American home. You are doing much, through your great body of graduates, to improve and bring it up to higher standards. That home today is not the old home of half a century ago. Because of necessity and modem invention it must extend its interest and its contacts with a great many other homes in its own community and with other people in neighboring communities just in the same way that no State can become entirely self-contained or be as self-contained as it was twenty or thirty years ago.

More and more we are becoming a part of a Nation which, because of changing conditions, means that we have to take part, all the way down to the smallest community and the home, in national affairs. Alabama cannot hoe its own row differently from other States, neither can my State of Georgia. More and more they have to plan, plan for the future, plan for the present, plan to work with the other fellow. There is one thing you are learning, and that is that you have to cooperate with your fellow men and women, cooperate in your own community, in your own State and throughout the country.

That is why I have been not only interested but very proud of all that your graduates are doing and of the fine spirit of humane service that the overwhelming majority of them carry with them throughout their lives.

Dr. Moton was talking about getting old. There is one thing that he exemplifies, and that is the thought that it is a terrible thing for anybody to say, "Why should I keep on living?" We are coming to the realization that it is a great privilege to be alive, no matter what the number of years we have covered. As somebody has said, it is grand no matter how old you get, to want to keep on living because there is still so much to be done. That is the spirit of you youngsters; it is the spirit of us in middle life; and it is the spirit, increasingly, of the older people in our Nation.

And so, my boy and girl friends, keep the ideals of your youth all through your lives.

I am happy to have been here. I want to come back some day in the future and I will if I can. In the meantime I give you my affectionate regards. Good luck in all the days to come.