The aim of the school has been to give a thorough literary training to colored young men and women. The industrial feature has not been neglected, although recently the school has not been able to do as much in that line as formerly. The reason for this has been the withdrawal of the Slater Fund. However, this department has been operating with such means as the officers have been able to obtain. The students in the carpentry shop make and repair all the furniture used in the school, such as bedsteads, chairs, tables, desks, washstands and dressers. The printing office is well equipped and much minute and pamphlet work has been done besides the publishing of the College journal, which is now conceded to be one of the best, if not the best, College magazine published by a colored institution in the country. The institution has been running but little over a decade. It boasts, however, of a prominence equal to any institution in the south founded and sustained by colored men. The character of its graduates and the showing they have made bespeak the thoroughness of its work. In fact, the officers of the institution, while recognizing the need and the cry for the industrial training of the Negro, have stoutly maintained that industrial education should not supplant the higher educational development of the Negro. The success of the 130 graduates since '85 has been sufficient argument for them to hold this point.
The young men who have entered the ministry are all prominent in the great church under whose auspices the school works. Many of the largest and most prominent churches in the connection are held by them, and they have merited each place. In the law and in medicine they are not behind, and in the schoolroom as teachers, many brilliant records have been made by its young men and women. As teachers, they are in demand, and in most cases give entire satisfaction.
The work of Dr. Price, in his efforts to lift the race to a higher plane of intellectual and moral development, is well known on both sides of the Atlantic. To speak of Livingstone and its aim is to speak of the one great desire of its lamented president. So thoroughly wedded was he to this idea and its development through the work of Livingstone College that no honor in church or state, however tempting the emolument attached to it, could induce him to give it up.
