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. The alliance of Northern philanthropists and white education reformers created the Southern Education Board to propagandize the gospel of industrial education. The primary funding mechanism for industrial education programs was the General Education Board created by the oil mogul John D Rockefeller in 1902. By 1921, Rockefeller had donated more than $129 million to the board. In addition to its own philanthropy, the general education board served as a clearing house to channel funding from other philanthropic organizations. >> 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. 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. Washington believed that educated black elite should take up the cause of industrial education for the vast majority of blacks, whom he regarded as a developing people. Like teachers should receive their training at industrial normal schools like Tuskegee. 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. 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 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. 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. >> The private colleges aimed to educate what W.E.B. DuBois called the talented tenth. 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. 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. The financial burden on black farming families to send a son or daughter to a college or university was enormous. Many students had to be self-supporting while in college, which often meant irregular attendance. Only a relative handful could sustain the commitment to graduate with a normal certificate or college degree, either of which qualified them for teaching in the better public and private black schools. 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. >> 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. We'll return to black higher education in a later module, where we look at legal precedence for the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education. [MUSIC]
