Park worked closely with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute from 1907 to 1914. While working under Washington, Park's primary interest was the system that had evolved to define Black-White relations in the South. Park said that he learned more about human nature and society while in the South. He says that, "These seven years were for me a sort of prolonged internship during which I gained a clinical and first hand knowledge of a first class social problem . . .was from Washington that I gained some adequate notion of how deep-rooted in human history and human nature social institutions were, and how difficult, if not impossible it was, to make fundamental changes in them by mere legislation or by legal artifice of any sort".