Thursday, April 7, 2011

An Idea: Hampton University

Hampton University opts to celebrate the birth of its Founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong.  Most universities will celebrate its founding or maybe the day the school opened its doors.  Perhaps, lost to the Hampton University community is the day that the school was founded, which was April 1, 1868.  Both the school's founder and its history is well documented in books, magazines, scholarly journals and the like.  Generations of students have graduated from this Institution and have gone out and made a way for both themselves and the communities, in which they found themselves.  The Institution's Alma Mater, like the Founder and the founding of the Institution, is packed with vision and ideas.  Equally important, to (the Founder, the reasons for the school, and the Alma Mater), is the way that the school and its residences have been portrayed in pictures.  There is an Idea, also at work.  Here are just a few, to celebrate the Institution's "founding," in which it is both a continuing and evolving, IDEA!


From the lips of the Founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong to your eyes:
"The thing to be done was clear: to train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people first by example, by getting land and homes; to give them not a dollar that they could earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor, to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands, and in this way to build up an industrial system for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character."

Hamptonians BUILD, LEARN, and HEAL!

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