p. 19 | The Oakwood Manual Training School by C. J. Boyd

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 19, 1916

The Oakwood Manual Training School

By C. J. Boyd

The past year has been an exceptionally good one at the Oakwood School, our training school for colored workers, located in Huntsville, Ala. The enrolment in the training department was 108. In addition, 80 children came to us from

the neighborhood; these were students in what we term our mission school. These children are taught by the girls from the normal department of the training school, but their normal instructor spends considerable time with the student teachers in their classrooms. She discovers their weaknesses and endeavors to correct them. This plan gives our teachers an opportunity to gain experience while yet under the tutorship and care of the training school. They are thus better qualified to go out into the distant fields for service after they are graduated, and the benefit that our institution has thus become to the neighborhood, greatly magnifies its work in the eyes of the neighbors.

The teachers’ institute was conducted at the school June 6 to July 19. Thirty-two teachers were present and received great help and inspiration from their work.

At the close of the regular school year in June, eleven were graduated. Three finished the ministerial course, two the Bible workers’, four the nurses’, and two the secretaries’ course. And these students will go forth from the institution to enter places of responsibility in the work.

One of the graduates came to our school three years ago from the island of Haiti. He had received a fair education in the French schools of the island before coming to Oakwood; but when he appeared in my office, he could not speak one word of English. I observed he could speak some Creole, and as there was another young man in our school who understood Creole, I called him in, and through this interpreter was enabled to communicate with Mery Abel, the young man from Haiti. He came with a definite aim, and remained three years with us. When with us, he worked awhile in the tent factory. Elder A. F. Prieger, the superintendent of his field, now calls him back to that island, expecting him to take the lead in the first tent effort for the colored people of Haiti.

Seventy-five per cent of our colored workers are students from the Oakwood School. Many of our graduates are having remarkable success in attracting large congregations to their tent services and in winning souls in different parts of the land.

The Lord has blessed in the industrial department of the school the past year. About five thousand dollars’ worth of tents were manufactured at our little tent factory during the tentmaking season this year. Our printing department, in addition to the publishing of our little paper, Gospel Herald and Oakwood Bulletin, is securing a number of jobs from the merchants in Huntsville and elsewhere.

We have splendid crops on our farm at this writing,—thirty-seven acres of good cotton, which we are just beginning to pick; ninety acres of corn in the shock; and good fields of sweet potatoes, sorghum, and peanuts. Our hay crop was heavy. A good crop of watermelons has been marketed. We have at present more than four hundred thoroughbred fowls on the place. A fine herd of spring calves can be seen running in the orchard.

Oakwood is a place of variety. The students in this school come in contact with the farm, with its herds and fowls, with its great oaks, living cedars, and flowering shrubs; then, too, they have the privilege of associating with students called together from every State in the South, and from the islands beyond; and lastly, the privilege of associating with Christian teachers who have had long experience in schools that are promoting the cause of Christian education.

As another school year now begins, our prospects were never brighter for a successful year’s work. In our travels in representing the work during the summer, we have found our constituency interested in the school and its welfare. Never before have the eyes of our colored people been turned toward the institution with such confident expectation. They are sending us their very best young men and women this year. An able writer has said that it is the exceptional men and women of the colored race that are going to do the most in behalf of the race. It is the exceptional boys and girls that we desire to have come to our school, that they may in turn become the men and women who will have a great part in this closing work of calling the attention of the ten million colored people of this land to a soon-coming Saviour.

We are glad for the interest which the North American Division Conference as a whole is taking in this great work. For all that has been accomplished in the past, we are indebted to a sympathizing constituency whose philanthropic hearts have beat in unison with the great movement to serve in behalf of the uplift of those of fewer opportunities, those who since time immemorial have been hewers of wood and drawers of water for their more favored brethren. C. J. BOYD.