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At the turn of the last century, it was indisputably clear
that Southern whites would invest very little in the education of black children.
Northern industrial philanthropists saw an opportunity
in this inequity to introduce a system of industrial education in black schools,
a system that would redound to the advantage of new South industries.
Prominent Southern politicians and white education reformers aligned themselves
with the industrial philanthropists to spread the gospel of industrial education.
At a region-wide conference held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1901,
University of Tennessee president Charles W Dabney called for
educating blacks as labor for Southern industries.
Quote, the Negro is in the South to stay, he is a necessity for Southern industries,
and the Southern people must educate and so elevate him or he will drag them down.
We must use common sense in the education of the Negro.
We must recognize in all its relations that momentous fact that the Negro is
a child race at least 2000 years behind the Anglo-Saxon and its development.
Nothing is more ridiculous than the program of the good religious people from
the North who insist upon teaching Latin, Greek, and
philosophy to the Negro students who come to their school, unquote.
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>> As the historian James Anderson notes,
the philanthropists encountered significant opposition to their
program from African American intellectual leaders,
who interpreted industrial education as a guarantee of black subordination.
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This opposition played out in the national debate between Tuskegee's president,
Booker T Washington, and the nation's most prominent black intellectual,
W.E.B. DuBois.
Although both Washington and DuBois advocated higher education for
the training of a black leadership class, DuBois called it the talented tenth,
they differed significantly regarding the purpose of an elite education.
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By contrast, DuBois and his allies in the Niagara movement envisioned a liberally
educated black leadership class that would assert itself in politics and campaign for
voting rights, equal education opportunities, and
the dismantling of the South's system of racial apartheid.
Black teachers were to be liberally educated at black colleges.
In this debate, Washington had the industrial philanthropists on his side,
but he was caught between a rock and a hard place.
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Whereas Washington viewed industrial education as an evolutionary means toward
black economic independence, the learning of trades for
example, white supremacists saw it as a means of keeping blacks in place in
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the bottom rungs of agriculture and industry.
Southern whites preferred the term training to education.
>> In the postbellum era,
Northern missionary societies founded higher education institutions for blacks.
Among others, Atlanta University, Morehouse College for men, and
Spelman College for women, and Clark University, all in Atlanta,
Fisk University in Nashville, and Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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The African Methodist Episcopal Church established colleges,
as did other black religious philanthropies.
Howard University in Washington, DC was established by a local missionary
society as a non-sectarian co-educational institution.
The black feeders schools for these colleges were private elementary and
secondary schools sponsored by the missionary societies,
according to historian Adam Fairclough.
Several decades passed before the private colleges, universities, and
normal schools were able to reap the benefits of higher grade,
private elementary and secondary schools.
For example, Atlanta University, which Fairclough hails as the quote,
flagship of black higher education, taught most of its students at the elementary or
grammar school level until the mid 1890s.
As they became fully functioning collegiate institutions at the turn
of the 20th century, private black colleges and universities were highly
regimented institutions that emphasized moral character and
Protestant piety, an emphasis that helped to placate Southern whites.
Their primary mission though was classical liberal education., including Latin and
Greek, ancient history, modern foreign languages and literature,
an emphasis that had enormous symbolic value as a marker of high aspirations and
emancipatory thinking.
And an assertion of equality with whites in an era of militant white supremacy.
The leaders and graduates of these institutions made a very brave statement.
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Yet, as a proportion of the total black college age population,
the number of graduates of these institutions who became teachers and
professional and business leaders in their communities was miniscule.
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As Fairclough notes, quote, by 1900 a mere
2,331 blacks had earned the degree of AB or BS.
Whites were six times more likely than blacks to earn a college degree, and
four times as likely to receive a high school education, end quote.
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Evidently, a little education went a long way.
Fairclough observes that, quote, many thousands of teachers
in rural black schools were normal school or college dropouts.
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>> During the Redeemer period from the 1870s to around 1890, a handful of
the former Confederate states established state normal schools for blacks.
By the 1910s, every Southern and border state operated A&M,
agricultural and mechanic, or land grant colleges for blacks,
with the state legislature supplementing their own negligible contributions
with federal subsidies provided by the Morrill Act of 1890.
These institutions had normal departments, but only one,
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University,
had a real collegiate department with only 12 students.
Dr. John L. PuckettProfessor of Education
Dr. Michael Charles JohanekSenior Fellow
