Despite the economic and political obstacles and despite persistent violent attacks, scattered across the North and South as part of the black people’s self-determined social and cultural development were a small number of high schools for black students and some colleges, mainly for developing teachers who could teach in the primary schools and to grow a class of organized “intellectuals,” as James Anderson puts it, who could lead “freed people to an appreciation of their historic responsibility to develop a better society” (29). In the early black high schools and universities, the few students who could afford to attend studied Greek and Latin, geometry, history, science, philosophy, and foreign languages. Anderson emphasizes that the purpose of these studies was not to imitate white people (most of whom had little education themselves), but to acquire the analytic skills necessary to understand their position as new citizens in a free society.
White business and political leaders—in this period—felt the need to restrict this direction of Black education: “They called for the special instruction of the former slaves in a manner that could not be adapted from the curriculum and teaching materials of the classical liberal tradition” (Anderson 31). What they decided to use and promote as the most efficient way to prepare black people for their assigned economic and civic roles was the Hampton-Tuskegee model, developed by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in the last decades of the 19th century. Gen. Samuel Armstrong and Booker T. Washington were the respective founders of these teacher preparation colleges.
Many people today have heard of the Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. DuBois “debates.” The two men are usually cast as representing opposing educational philosophies: (1) Washington’s practical, industrial and business education for the masses to develop their own enterprises vs. (2) liberal arts education promoted for DuBois’s “talented tenth,” an intellectual vanguard. But Chapters 2 and 3 of Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South goes into great detail to explain that the Hampton-Tuskegee model ( supported by Washington only until around 1920) had very little to do with practical self-help and self-determination. Particularly surprising, given popular accounts of the debates, is that Gen. Armstrong, Washington’s teacher and mentor, opposed black enfranchisement and political liberation. His purpose was entirely to ensure that the newly emancipated population would learn to accept their subordinate role without the need for White people to resort to force to keep them in line.
“Hampton was neither a college nor a trade school but a normal school [for the training of elementary school teachers] composed of elementary school graduates who were seeking additional years of schooling…so that they might qualify for a common school teaching certificate” (Anderson 35). At the core of this teacher preparation was manual labor, designed to teach students “‘how to work steadily and regularly, to attend promptly at certain hours to certain duties’”:
As [Gen. Samuel] Armstrong put it in his last report, ‘We do not mean to say that much is not learned by every faithful student in these departments; he or she will be a better cook, laundress, or farmer, and surely much needed lessons in promptness and thoroughness are inculcated, but still the object in view is not to teach a trade but to get the work done.’ Such jobs were no more instructive in ideas and skills of ‘self-help’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ than the hoeing, picking, mining, washing, and ironing that black southerners had done as slaves for centuries. Armstrong required his prospective teachers to perform the same routinized drudgery as the working class that they were destined to instruct so that the teachers would stand as exemplars of the ‘dignity of labor.’ His great fear was that black pupils, under teachers trained in the literary or academic tradition, might come to view formal schooling as an avenue to escape hard toil. Hampton’s emphasis on the moral value of hard labor in contrast to technical and skill training evidenced Armstrong’s concern with the economic adjustment rather than advancement of black southerners. Hampton’s theme, ‘Education for Life,’ meant the training of blacks to adjust to the life that had been carved out for them within an oppressive social order. (Anderson 35-37)
It is this model of education for the acceptance of subordinate roles that became tremendously popular from the point of view of White philanthropists and officials. Booker T. Washington’s prominence after his 1895 speech at the Atlanta Exposition earned the Hampton-Tuskegee model even more support from White people. But as Armstrong writes, “Washington and Tuskegee were Armstrong and Hampton in blackface” (73):
Yet, with all the talk about industrial training, both contemporary observers and later historians mistakenly assumed that trade, technical, and commercial training formed the essence of Washington’s educational philosophy…In 1903 Daniel C. Smith, Tuskegee’s auditor, made a study of the school’s industrial training program. According to Smith, of 1,550 students, “there were only a dozen students in the school capable of doing a fair job as joiners. There were only fifteen boys who could lay brick.” “Meanwhile,” Smith continued, “the number of students who are doing unskilled drudgery work is increasing, and the number who receive no training through the use of tools is getting to be very large.” This finding was not inconsistent with Tuskegee’s aims. Nor was Tuskegee’s failure to teach commercial or business subjects, despite Washington’s preachings about economic development as the only salvation of black Americans. In 1906, in assessing Tuskegee’s endeavors in the teaching of business and commercial subjects, Robert E. Park discovered that “There is a large amount of business conducted by the school, but there is no school of business here.” There were “a large number of stenographers employed on the ground but stenography and typewriting are not taught here.” Three papers and a number of pamphlets were published at Tuskegee, but printing was not taught there. There was not even a formal course in bookkeeping. (Anderson 75)
White people’s patronage and support for the Hampton-Tuskegee model is characteristic of White involvement in the education of Black Americans. The economic role that the country prepares for any subset of the population determines the educational opportunities, structures, and aims of their schools.
Some African Americans, like Washington, worked to fit themselves into the structures orchestrated by White philanthropists and policy makers. Many, however, did not and worked persistently in the strand of what Givens calls “fugitive pedagogy.” James Anderson writes a detailed case study of Fort Valley High and Industrial School in Georgia (later Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School and eventually Fort Valley State University). The school was founded in 1895 by a group of formerly enslaved men led by John Davison, who had been educated at Atlanta University. Initially, Fort Valley was designed to mirror the priorities of Atlanta University (where W.E.B. DuBois would soon find a home); the founders stressed the intellectual development of students who would later become teachers and cultural leaders, prepared through rigorous studies in the liberal arts. As the Fort Valley website still boasts today, in 2024, “One of the first graduates of the young school was Austin Thomas Walden, who graduated in 1902 and became Georgia’s first black judge since Reconstruction.” The design of the school was clearly not to teach accommodation to drudgery, but to teach freedom.
As Davison looked for Northern sponsors to support the practically penniless school, he quickly came under pressure to shift priorities toward what powerful philanthropists called “industrial education.” These philanthropists, George Foster Peabody and William H. Baldwin among them, planned carefully to expand the Hampton-Tuskegee model, even establishing systems of inspection to weed out “fake industrial schools…that gave too much attention to academic training” (Anderson 118). Anderson cites a letter from Davison to Peabody in which the formerly enslaved champion of Black education writes: “I have always thought…that the colored man, when it comes to schools for his own people, should not only have considerable voice, but should be required to largely govern them, for the object of all education is to develop the power of self-government” (130). The philanthropists wouldn’t have it; they threatened to withhold funding unless a principal was appointed who was committed to industrial education. Davison was first forced to attend Hampton himself for a summer course in “industrial education” and was soon compelled to resign as school principal.
Eventually Henry A. Hunt was appointed principal. He quickly instituted courses in “sewing, cooking, carpentry, and gardening” and replaced teachers whom Davison had hired for their academic interests and intellectual independence with a new faculty that would embrace the teaching of drudgery. This revised aim for Valley Fort greatly pleased both the Northern sponsors and Georgia authorities and established a base for the “Hamptonization” of secondary education right in the center of the former Confederacy. (I will study the interesting case of Henry Hunt in a later post. Anderson treats Hunt as signficantly compromised by comparison with Davison; Hunt traded the education of autonomous citizens for the status and funding granted by Northern philanthropists. But Hunt is also one of the heroes of Vanessa Siddle-Walker’s The Education of Horace Tate; in Siddle-Walker’s account, Hunt skillfully hid his true ambitions for the Black community behind a carefully calibrated subterfuge and then passed his knowledge of how to survive and maniputlate White people to his protege, Horace Tate. Could both versions of Hunt be accurate? How do we parse the contradictions?)
The pattern of Northern White support for “industrial” education continued across the South during the early part of the 20th century. But it is crucial to understand that “industrial” referred to the lowest forms of manual labor, especially as farmhands and domestic workers, not as preparation for skilled trades. In fact, the end of World War I and continuing population shifts from rural to urban employment resulted in a severe shrinking of economic opportunities for Black people in the South. Anderson cites many contemporary reports:
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the heavy trucks and transfers were being manned by white workers where black workers had formely been. Moreover, “White school boys are taking the place of Negro elevator girls”…In Kansas City, Missouri, black waitresses were dismissed for a large drugstore and replaced by white females… “[I]n Spartanburg, South Carolina, white men are taking many of the jobs formerly done by Negroes such as driving express wagons and portering.” Similarly in Columbia, South Carolina, white workers had replaced black workers as drivers of garbage and dirt wagons fot he city. Black workers in the same city were “losing out in the building trades.” In Atlanta, Georgia, there was a general feeling among black workers “that the jobs they were losing to whites resulted from premeditation and proscription.” (Anderson 230, citing reports by Ira Reid in the Julius Rosenwald Fund Papers).
Note that this replacement of Black workers by White workers pre-dated the Great Depression. The pressure on Black urban employment was caused primarily by shifting populations from farmlands to cities, rather than by economic contraction. Cities, including in the South, were growing and industrializing rapidly.
The effect on White efforts to attend to the education of Black children and youth again followed White ideas about the caste status of Black people generally. Understanding that education in skilled trades would put Blacks in competition with Whites for better-paying urban employment, White philanthropists shifted their investments away from their previous emphasis on “industrial education,” bogus as it was. I quote at length from Anderson, because his summary of the trend is so important for understanding the later 20th and early 21st centuries.
The philanthropists now faced a blank wall. The rampant displacement of black workers from even the lowest rung of the industrial ladder posed anew the question of what could be accomplished by the industrial education of black youth. The philanthropists’ astonishing answer was to terminate their movement to industrialize black secondary education and to turn their wealth and power more fully toward shaping black collegiate education. During the late 1920s, Hampton and Tuskegee abandoned their industrial training programs and soon became the two best-endowed black colleges for liberal arts education. The black federal land-grant colleges, built to foster agriculture and industrial educaiton, were also transformed into basically liberal arts institutions. A system of higher education, however, presupposed the existence of academic high schools with adequate courses of study taught during a definite series of years by competent instructors. Yet it was that system of eduation which the philanthropists, in cooperation with southern state and local governments, had used their wealth and power to subordinate to the perceived necessity of training blacks to fit into the South’s caste-ridden economy. Without question, the great economic expenditures and reform crusades for black industrial education contributed directly and significantly to the underdevelopment of black secondary schools.
But Anderson goes even further. The push towards “industrial education” perverted what could have been a natural progress towards education for both freedom and economic empowerment. Remember, the end of the Civil War brought enormous energy towards the creation of Black educational establishments where the purpose of education was understood as allowing full participation in all aspects of the country’s life. The North was in the early stages of the shift from a primarily agricultural to a primarily industrial economy, and the South had not yet begun this shift. Over the next 50 years, roughly 1880 - 1930, this economic transformation resulted for White people in the expansion of education from universal primary education to near-universal secondary education as well. There were two motives: (1) Too many adolescents wandering the streets of cities without adequate employment was a recipe for trouble; (2) Industrializing economies required a higher degree of literacy and numeracy to staff the mass production, mass distribution, bureaucratized economic systems with obedient skilled factory, transportation, and office workers.
But the great majority of Black youth, especially in the South, were pushed towards other economic and political roles. They continued to work on farms, began to emigrate to Northern more industrialized places, or found themselves conscripted into peonage by mine-owners, steel manufacturers, railroad magnates, and prison farms. Again, it is worth quoting Anderson at length:
Whereas the majority, 54 percent, of southern white children of high school age were enrolled in public high schools by the mid-1930s, more than eight out of every ten black children of high school age were not enrolled in secondary schools…This pattern of southern black high school enrollment held through the 1930s. In 1940…only 23 percent of the black high school age population was enrolled in public secondary schools. In Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states with large black populations, less than 18 percent of the black high school age population was enrolled in public secondary schools in 1940. For the nation as a whole and the white South, the elite public high school of the late nineteenth century was transformed into the “people’s college” during the first third of the twentieth century. For blacks in the South, the struggle to attain public high school for the majority of their high school age children would continue beyond the post-World War II era. While American youth in general were being pushed into public high schools, southern black youth, a sizable minority of black high school age children in America, were being locked out of the nation’s public high schools. This oppression of black schoolchildren during the critical stage of the transformation of American secondary educaiton seriously affected the long-term development of education in the black community and was one of the fundamental reasons that the educational progress of black Americans lagged far behind that of other Americans.