DUE 12/04/15 - 1000 WORDS essay- Apa Style - no internet - only one resource
allisky
chapter_6.docEDF 3660 Online Final Exam
Directions: Respond to the three questions below. There is no restriction on the length of your response for the questions. Students typically use between 1000 words for each response. Be sure that you fully answer ALL parts of the question. Don’t waste time and words defining terms-stick to simply answering what is asked of you in each question. For all responses, be sure to use specific examples from your textbook to support your major points. DO NOT USE INTERNET SOURCES ON YOUR EXAM!! If you use internet sources on your exam, you will receive a grade of zero.
You must type your responses using word processing software (save your file as .doc or .rtf). Your work must be double-spaced, 12 Font, Times New Roman with 1” margins. All essays must have an introduction and conclusion as well. Save your file in the following format: LastName_First Initial_Final Exam and submit it in the Final Exam drop box by the posted due date.
The following exam format gives you an opportunity to show how effectively you can develop and express your ideas. You should, therefore, take care to develop your point of view, present your ideas logically and clearly, and use language from the course content precisely. Use your OWN words, with 3-4 quotes from the book to support your major points.
Important Reminders:
1. Discuss the degree to which African-Americans themselves effectively took responsibility for their own education following the Civil War, and the degree to which the efforts of whites interfered with black educational achievements. Be sure to use 1 or 2 examples from the textbook to support your major points.
School and Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives by Steven Tozer, Guy Senese, Paul Violas
SOURCE # 1
Diversity and Equity Schooling and African Americans Chapter Overview Chapter 6 examines the relationships among political economy, ideology, and schooling in the experience of African Americans after the Civil War. Political–economic developments of that period included the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which granted civil and political rights to former slaves and other African Americans; the period of Reconstruction, in which African Americans achieved significant political power in the South and a number of higher education institutions were established for African Americans; and the subsequent period of “redemption,” in which the oppression of African Americans by southern Whites through Jim Crow laws and revisions of state constitutions reached terrible proportions. Ideologically, racist European Americans believed that this oppression was justified on the basis of a “scientific” view that Whites were biologically more evolved than African Americans and that classical liberal commitments to freedom and equality did not therefore apply to “less evolved” human beings. In terms of schooling, it is noteworthy that African Americans were successful during the Reconstruction period in establishing schools for Black children throughout the South. In general, southern Whites had less access to quality education than did southern Blacks. The redemption era, however, particularly the period marked by the ascendancy of Booker T. Washington to political and educational power, resulted in significantly reduced opportunities for the education of African American youth. While Washington often is regarded as a hero of African American advancement, this chapter shows that his commitment to vocational education and acceptance of disfranchisement and lack of civil rights for African Americans were opposed by some Black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois. The contrasts between the social, political, and educational analyses of Booker T. Washington and those of Du Bois are drawn in detail and underscored by the Primary Source Reading. Read more at location 173
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7. Introduction: Common Schools in the South After the common-school movement began in the Northeast, it spread rapidly throughout the rest of the United States. State governments began to pass schooling legislation before the Civil War, and by the 1870s thousands of children were attending public schools in the North and the South. While state school legislation moved more rapidly in the North, one of the most significantdevelopments of this postwar period was the increasing number of African American children attending school in the South. In fact, as early as the 1870s, in parts of the South, Black children attended school in proportionately higher numbers than did White children. However, the educational history of African Americans in the postwar South presented cause for concern as well as for celebration. Political–Economic Dimensions of Reconstruction and Redemption1 On New Year’s day in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing the end of slavery for all states in rebellion against the Union. It was not until several months after the war ended in the spring of 1865, however, that Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which freed 4 million slaves, 31 ⁄2 million of them in the South. By that time Congress Read more at location 175
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13. farmers, working for subsistence only.3 During this time the southern redemption movement attacked the civil and political rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and enforced during Reconstruction. After the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and into the 1890s, local White supremacy laws were passed to prohibit Black people from using public facilities, such as parks, buildings, cemeteries, railroad cars, and restrooms. “Pig laws” were passed, which imposed harsh, multiyear prison terms for minor crimes (such as stealing a pig) if they were committed by Black people. At the same time, “convict lease” programs were implemented so that White southern industrialists, lumber companies, and mine owners could lease chained convicts from the state and put them to work essentially for free. The death rate on these chain gangs was even higher than the death rate for slaves on the prewar plantations. In 1890 Mississippi used a constitutional convention to establish literacy and poll-tax requirements that deprived most Black people of the vote, and 11 other states followed the “Mississippi Plan” in the next 20 years. In Louisiana, for example, the number of Black voters was cut from 130,000 to 1,300 in a sixyear period. States were further encouraged to follow the Mississippi example when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Mississippi Plan as constitutional in 1898. Two years before, the Supreme Court had upheld the “separate but equal” laws that segregated Blacks from Whites in public places, even though it was clear that these “Jim Crow” laws were being used to create a caste system that institutionalized the inferior status of African Americans in southern social, political, and economic life.4 The redemption period successfully destroyed most of the advances made by African Americans during Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Redemption, and African American Schooling This period of intense oppression of southern Black citizens included economic privation, violation of civil and political rights, and racially motivated lynchings that numbered in the thousands. In this atmosphere, an educator from Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute became the most prominent African American leader of his time. In part, Booker T. Washington achieved this leadership position by announcing, before a national audience at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, that it was acceptable for Black people to remain separate from Whites in social and political matters but that Black people could help themselves economically by being more industrious and thrifty—and by obtaining the kind of education that would equip them for manual labor in the southern economy. Rather than calling for African Americans to directly confront their segregated and oppressed social and political status, Washington told his Black listeners, “Cast down your buckets where you are!” They would thus take their places as laborers and trade workers, earning the respect of Whites in the South. The “Atlanta compromise” speech was a message that southern White leaders and northern industrialists were delighted to hear. Washington’s accession to power and recognition was signaled in 1901 by dinner at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt and his family. From his base at Tuskegee he gradually built what became known as the “Tuskegee machine,” and from 1901 to 1915 he was in the heyday of his career. Yet “what was for Washington personally the best of times was for most Blacks the worst,” writes Louis R. Harlan, “the most discouraging period since the freeing of the slaves.”5 Indeed, as Washington’s rise to power was crowned in 1901, White Alabama Democrats convened to crown their political supremacy over African Americans. The state’s legislature authorized a constitutional convention for May 1901. The convention was so permeated with Read more at location 177
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19. racially extremist convictions that former governor William C. Oates felt compelled to comment on the change in White politicians’ opinions regarding the status of Black people. He was appalled by the increase in racial hatred since Reconstruction, when Black people were enfranchised and competing for political office. “Why, sir, the sentiment is altogether different now, when the Negro is doing no harm, why, people want to kill him and wipe him from the face of the earth.” These were the times that historian Rayford Logan called the nadir of African American history. The most virulent “anti-Negro” speakers at the 1901 Alabama constitutional convention were the Democrats from the Black belt or from counties bordering the Black belt.6 The Black belt representatives successfully presented a resolution on education that brought the new state constitution into harmony with the 1890 House Bill 504, which allowed township trustees to fund White schools at a higher level than Black schools. The Black belt representatives substituted the phrase “just and equitable” for the corresponding phrase in the constitution of 1875, which required that all funds be appointed “for the equal benefit of all the children.” During the convention the Black belt delegates indicated what they meant by justice and equity. One delegate said, “There is no necessity for paying a teacher for a colored school the same amount you pay to White school teachers, because you can get them at much less salary. Under the present laws of Alabama, if the law is carried out, the colored pupil gets the same amount of money per capita as the White pupil, and that is not justice.” In this atmosphere of racial animosity, the state’s constitution was changed to permit local school officers to control apportionments and discriminate against Black schoolchildren. The concept of “just and equitable” expressed at this convention stood in marked contrast to the freed men and women’s politics that had endorsed educational and political equality regardless of race. To the extent that Booker T. Washington aligned himself with the Black belt planters, he joined the most antidemocratic forces of his era.7 But to assess Washington’s approach to schooling for African Americans in the South, it is first necessary to examine those schools in the Reconstruction and redemption periods. Schooling in the Black Belt Few values and aspirations were more firmly rooted in the freedmen’s culture than education. Their crusade for universal schooling was perhaps the most striking illustration of their postwar campaign for self-improvement. Their idea of universal public schooling, regardless of race or class, was a conception of education and democracy unprecedented in southern history. The prewar constitutions and laws of the Confederate states denied literacy and formal schooling to Black people and paid little attention to public education at all. South Carolina’s constitution made no mention of education. Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida had brief general clauses about encouraging the means of education and using the proceeds of federal land grants to support schools. A clause in the Georgia constitution of 1777 about schools was omitted in later revisions, though provision was made in 1798 for promoting “seminaries of learning.” Mississippi and North Carolina alluded to the value of learning in their constitutions but included no specifications about state schools. Virginia, which defeated Jefferson’s proposals for public schools in the 18th and 19th centuries, later used a “capitation” (or per capita) tax for use of White primary schools. Louisiana and Texas went somewhat further than the others, providing for superintendents, a school fund, and state school systems but hedging the language regarding the implementation of public systems of education. For example, Louisiana’s constitution of 1852 stated that the legislature might abolish the superintendent’s office, while in Texas the legislature was to establish a school system “as... Read more at location 178
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25. freedmen were concerned, the constitution of 1868 provided virtually every promise of equal opportunities. Further, their rights were ensured in part by the presence of Peyton Finley, an African American citizen from the Black belt, on the state board of education. He pressed constantly for an equal division of the public school fund among African Americans and Whites.10 Educational opportunities were not always equal, but Black people’s political participation and the racial equality established in Alabama’s Reconstruction constitution enabled them to make gains in public schooling between 1868 and the reestablishment of planter dominance in the late 1870s. For instance, in 1877, in 11 of the 21 Alabama Black belt counties, the percentage of Black children of school age enrolled in school exceeded the percentage of White children enrolled (see Exhibit 6.1). For the Black belt as a whole, the average length of public school terms for Black children was longer than that for White children, though the average length of White school terms in 11 of the counties exceeded that for Black children (see Exhibit 6.2). The average monthly pay for Black teachers in 1877 exceeded that for White teachers in 18 of the 21 Black belt counties (see Exhibit 6.3). As long as the state funding of Alabama’s Black belt remained nearly equal between the races, or even if the school fund was divided according to the poll tax and real estate taxes paid by the two races, Black communities, given their quest for education, could continue to foster the expansion and improvement of public schools. But this was all to change with the end of Reconstruction. The seeds of the destruction of educational advancement in Black communities were planted in 1875, the year the redeemers—White Democrats—began to regain control of Alabama’s Black belt. In Macon County, for example, in 1875 the county’s two state representatives, both Black Republicans, were charged with and convicted of felonies—adultery and grand larceny—by the newly elected circuit judge, James Edward Cobb. They Read more at location 179
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31. sentenced by Cobb to chain gangs. Cobb, a Democrat and former Confederate colonel, had been captured at Gettysburg and had spent the remainder of the war in Union prisons. He charged the district’s White Republican state senator with perjury, but the senator avoided prosecution by resigning from office. Throughout Alabama’s Black belt in 1875 freedmen were driven from political office and either disfranchised or controlled firmly by White Democrats. Consequently, the state’s constitution of 1875, reflecting the reestablishment of planter political supremacy, severely restricted the amount of money available for public schools.11 The constitution framed by the Black belt redeemers in 1875 legally required racial segregation in schools. It also altered the governance of public education in ways that placed it permanently in White hands. However, there was no wholesale demolition of the structures the former slaves and their Republican allies had created. Most important, the legal framework of school finance in the 1875 constitution was strictly on a per capita child basis and for the equal benefit of each race, thus leaving no discretion to any official to discriminate for or against either racial group. Reconstruction had nearly ended in the Black belt in 1875, and the redeemers were committed to retrenchment in public education. But two key factors protected the continued development of education in the Black communities. First, Black people could still vote, and the redeemers knew that as long as they sought to win Black votes, it was politically dangerous to tamper excessively with Black public education. Second, Black public education was protected in part because of the legal safeguards for equal funding that the freedmen had inserted in the state constitution of 1868 and which remained a part of the 1875 constitution.12 Hence, even during a decade of redeemer government in Alabama’s Black belt from 1877 to 1887, Black education continued to prosper. In 1887, as in 1877, the Read more at location 180
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37. percentage of school-age Black children enrolled in school exceeded the percentage of White children enrolled in 11 of the 21 counties (see Exhibit 6.1). With respect to length of school terms, in 20 of 21 counties in 1887, the Black school terms were longer than or equal to the White school terms (see Exhibit 6.2). Moreover, racial disparities in the average length of school terms had increased considerably in favor of Black children since 1877—from 84 to 86 days for Black pupils and from 82 to 71 days for White pupils. This represented significant improvement of educational conditions in Black communities between 1877 and 1887. Conditions for Whites declined as Black students took advantage of schooling opportunities that Whites did not have. These included schools supported by churches, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and local Black citizens. Only in a few instances did Whites move toward parity. The average monthly pay of Black teachers in 1887 exceeded the average monthly pay of White teachers in 13 counties, but Blacks had earned more than Whites in 18 counties in 1877 (see Exhibit 6.3). Hence, as we shall see, Booker T. Washington entered the Black belt in 1881 in the middle of an era of advancement in Black education dating back to the Reconstruction constitution of 1868. Approximately 10 years after Washington’s arrival, Black education fell on hard times. In 1890, State Superintendent of Education Solomon Palmer, in his annual report, introduced his discussion of major problems confronting public education by declaring that Alabama had to increase school revenues to keep pace with other states and meet the growing demand of its school population. He then proceeded to review the complaints against the way in which the school funds were apportioned and spent. The two principal complaints were that Blacks in the Black belt counties received nearly all the area’s school funds while paying virtually no taxes and that Black pupils were not mentally advanced to the point where they needed as much education as White pupils, and therefore did not need as much money for Read more at location 181
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43. their education. Palmer’s response was to place public school funds in the hands of local White school authorities, to be spent at their discretion. In 1890 Palmer’s plan was introduced in the Alabama legislature as House Bill 504. It passed in the House and Senate in February 1891. The new law required the state superintendent to apportion the public school fund according to the school-age population but authorized township trustees to apportion funds as they deemed “just and equitable.” This law effectively relieved the superintendent of education of the responsibility for apportioning the school fund between the races, and it was used to get around the state’s constitutional provision requiring that the school fund be apportioned on a per capita basis and for the equal benefit of both races.13 No political faction in Alabama was more in favor of this new plan than the White Democrats of the Black belt counties. Representative Smith of Russell County thought it was the best bill ever introduced in the Alabama legislature and declared that the author of the bill “deserved a vote of thanks from the white people of the state.” The superintendent of schools of Wilcox County, where in 1891 above 85 percent of the schoolage population was Black, welcomed the new law by proclaiming that “Wilcox never had such a boom on schools. The new law has stimulated the Whites so that neighborhoods where no schools existed for years, are now building houses and organizing schools.” It was clear both to Blacks and to Whites that this law assigned state funds to White county officials to allocate as they chose. The result in Black belt counties was to permit school officers to pour money into White schools and give tiny sums to the Black schools. Ironically, the Black belt Dem ocrats favored a “color-blind” distribution of the school fund over creating a racially distinct tax base and apportionment because the former would permit them to take an even larger share of the tax base.14 The day after the passage of House Bill 504, a “colored convention” convened in Montgomery, the state’s capital. The general purpose of the convention was to “discuss subjects which would benefit the Negro race in Alabama.” A pressing concern was the newly passed school-fund apportionment law. In the evening session of the convention Booker T. Washington spoke against the law. His speech was described by a reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser as a “bitter” indictment of the Alabama legislature for authorizing school officers to bypass the 1875 constitutional provision for equal apportionment of the already meager school funds. Ironically, only three years earlier, Washington had said, “The rate at which prejudice is dying out is so rapid as to justify the conclusion that the Negro will in a quarter of a century enjoy in Alabama every right that he now enjoys in Pennsylvania.” He had spoken too soon. Black Alabamians were about to enter the era from 1890 to 1910, referred to by Benjamin Brawley as the “vale of tears.” With the new school-funding statute in place, the campaign to shortchange Black education had an open field.15 After 1890 the Democrats in Black belt counties seized the school funds of the disfranchised Black citizens. Consequently, the general enrollment and school terms of Black children and the average pay of Black teachers came to a standstill and in many cases actually decreased, while educational conditions among Whites began to improve sharply (see Exhibits 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3). In vital respects, Black education in the Black belt counties, which had advanced steadily from 1867 to 1887, declined significantly from 1887 to 1897. In 10 counties, the percentage of school-age Black children enrolled in school was lower than in 1887. In 17 counties, the Black school terms were shorter than they had been in 1887, and the average monthly pay of Black teachers decreased in 19 of the 21 counties between 1887 and 1897. Hence, two years after Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” address, the speech that... Read more at location 182
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49. 1877, 1887, or 1897. Moreover, in 14 counties in 1915, the percentage of school-age Black children enrolled in school had fallen below the 1897 rates (see Exhibit 6.1). Thus, relative to White enrollments and relative to their position in 1897, Black school enrollments declined significantly during the apex of Washington’s career. Similarly, in 1915, the length of White school terms and the average monthly pay of White teachers exceeded those for Blacks, usually by significant margins, in every Black belt county. In all but four counties in 1915, the average monthly pay of White teachers doubled that of Black teachers (see Exhibit 6.3). This was a drastic turnaround from 1877, when the average monthly pay of Black teachers exceeded that of White teachers in 19 of the 21 Black belt counties. Finally, the percentage of Black teachers decreased, generally sharply, in 19 of the 21 Black belt counties (Exhibit 6.4). After 1890 and until Washington’s death in 1915, African Americans’ conception of community advancement turned inward. Assuming a defensive posture, they concentrated on strengthening their institutions and surviving in the face of an undemocratic and unjust social order, since they no longer had political clout. Their educational advancement during the Washington era depended heavily on private sacrifice. In 1915, approximately 60 percent of the schoolhouses for Black children in Alabama’s Black belt were privately owned (Exhibit 6.5). A large amount of money was contributed by Blacks to public education over and above that paid as taxes. It was through such traditions and customs of self-sacrifice that Black communities kept afloat a fragmented and feeble school system during the “vale of tears.”17 African American commitment to education was so strong that 10 years after the end of Reconstruction, attendance at Black schools was still higher than at most White schools. Exhibits 6.1 through 6.5 provide a large amount of data, but data always must be interpreted. What is your interpretation of the story that is told in these five tables? Thinking Critically about the Read more at location 183
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55. Booker T. Washington’s Career While appraising Booker T. Washington’s influence on public education for Blacks in Alabama, African American reformer and historian Horace Mann Bond wrote that “the historian of educational events may find in the life of the builder of Tuskegee Institute perhaps the most illuminating point of departure from which to evaluate the times and the social and economic forces in which he was involved.” Bond cautioned us not to make two grave errors. First, we should not attribute momentous social and economic changes to Washington’s heroic leadership. Second, we should not judge his greatness by immediate quantitative and institutional results. After all, said Bond, Booker T. Washington had become a legend, and “who shall deny the importance of legends, as social forces, in affecting the course of human history?” The continuing interest in Washington and his era gives at least some credence to Bond’s observations.18 There is also much validity to Bond’s suggestion that Washington’s life is an “illuminating point of departure” from which to examine a critical historical moment in the development of African American education, the period from Reconstruction to the great migration of southern African Americans to the urban North from 1914 to 1930. Born a slave in 1856, he was already of school age when the former slaves mobilized to create in the South a system of universal public education. Washington, a part of this movement himself, described vividly their struggle for education: “Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.” As a schoolboy, he worked at a salt furnace from 4 to 9 a.m. before attending day school, and later, he worked in the morning Read more at location 185
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61. and attended school for a few hours every afternoon. In 1872, at age 16 and crudely educated, he went off to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. He was one of hundreds of young African Americans who flocked to the normal schools and colleges in search of an education that would enable them to lead their people effectively.19 Washington started working as a teacher in 1875 and in 1879 became a teacher and assistant at Hampton Institute. In 1881, he went to Tuskegee and began his life’s work. By that time Reconstruction had collapsed, and his career as an educational statesman was launched in a fundamentally different political context from the one in which he attended elementary and normal school. The South became a one-party region under the control of a reactionary ruling elite that sought to contain the freedmen’s progressive campaign for democracy and universal schooling. In this context, Washington rose to great heights as an educational and political statesman for African Americans everywhere. Again we are reminded, as historian Louis R. Harlan has written, “Washington’s rise coincided with a setback of his race.”20 With Bond’s cautions in mind, great social and political changes will not be attributed to Washington’s influence here, nor will his contribution be evaluated in terms of institutional results. Nonetheless, it should be borne in mind that one of Washington’s important claims and a central part of his legacy was the belief that despite political compromises, he had a favorable impact on the advancement of public education in Black communities. In Up from Slavery Washington wrote about teachers in Alabama’s Black belt, where schools were in session only three to five months out of the year, and how he and his graduates worked to improve those conditions. He spoke frequently of Tuskegee graduates who were “showing the people how to extend the school term to 4, 5, and even 7 months.” In 1911 he claimed that as a result of the Tuskegee program there existed in Macon County “a model public school system, supported in part by the county board of education, and in part by the contributions of the people themselves.”21 Undoubtedly, Washington was a ceaseless advocate for education. On speaking platforms, through periodicals, and in the White and Black press, he lost no opportunity to plead for the advancement of public education. Indeed, the chief benefit that Washington intended Black people to receive from the “Atlanta Compromise” speech was the chance to attain an education that would fit them for useful employment. The central concern of this chapter is with what actually happened to Black public education during Washington’s career, particularly in Alabama’s Black belt, where he became the chief spokesperson for that struggle. Washington and Schooling in the Black Belt In the summer of 1881 Washington went to Macon County, Alabama, to become principal of the newly created Black state normal school in the town of Tuskegee. This was a place in the deep South—the Black belt—where he had never been before but where his people had struggled for generations to forge and nurture a culture that placed a high premium on literacy and formal schooling. The “Tuskegee story” of Washington’s era runs counter to the parallel development of Black education. The story is symbolized by a statue on Tuskegee’s campus portraying Washington as “lifting the veil of ignorance from the Negro race.” This particular legacy holds that there is plenty of room for debate over Washington’s methods, but none over his results. He demonstrated that against overwhelming odds he could turn a dilapidated shanty and a run-down church in rural Alabama into the most famous Black institution of learning of its time. Over the years schools and colleges (normal schools) founded and taught by Tuskegee alumni sprang up throughout the rural South, helping downtrodden African Americans improve and expand their local school systems by finding a common ground of... Read more at location 186
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67. the worst treatment of Black public education by state and local school officers since the end of slavery. Indeed, Washington’s generation was sandwiched between two important progressive eras in southern Black public education: (1) the two decades (1877–1897) after Reconstruction and (2) the two decades (1915–1935) after Washington’s death. Both progressive eras were sustained by grassroots movements in Black communities designed to challenge rather than cooperate with southern White authorities. It is revealing that the post-Washington school campaigns were precipitated mainly by ordinary Black men and women who defied one of his sacred principles: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Washington urged African Americans to remain in the South and find common ground with White planters and businesspeople. But many African Americans were willing to tolerate only one generation of state-enforced illiteracy. Hence, in 1915 Black southerners en masse picked up their “buckets” and headed north in search of better economic and educational opportunities. Just as the freedmen had used political power to foster universal schooling during the Reconstruction era, Black workers during the post-Washington era used the withdrawal of their labor power as a powerful form of protest against intolerable economic and social conditions. Many Black families remained in the South, however. What they did in the two decades after his death was monumental. Their defiance of southern White authority, coupled with a grassroots campaign for universal Read more at location 187
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73. schooling, radically altered educational opportunities for Black schoolchildren. The proportion of southern Black children ages 5 to 14 enrolled in school increased from 36 percent in 1900 to 78 percent by 1935, and the corresponding rate for Whites went from 55 percent in 1900 to 79 percent in 1935. Younger Black children, whose rates of enrollment were significantly lower than those of younger Whites in 1900, had reached parity by 1935. Black high school enrollment increased from 3 percent of the high-school-age Black population in 1910 to 18 percent in 1935, and White high school enrollment increased from 10 to 54 percent. There was far from parity at the secondary level, but the overall improvements in Black elementary and secondary schooling represented significant improvement since the age of Washington. Undoubtedly, Booker T. Washington would have been proud of the educational achievements of his successors, particularly of rural Black people. It was an educational awakening of the same kind as the freedmen’s school campaigns he recalled with such pride. It was also a kind that he never witnessed during his career as educational statesman of Black America.23 Washington had tried in his own passive style to halt the Democrats’ dismantling of the Black public school system. He urged White school reformers, especially northern White philanthropists who worked in the South, to take a strong stand on behalf of state support for Black rural schools. He arranged in 1909 for the publication and dissemination of a pamphlet by Charles Coon, a White county school superintendent in North Carolina, showing that more tax money was paid by Black North Carolinians than was allocated to their schools. Washington was propagandizing against the southern White claim that White taxpayers were paying for Black public schools, especially in Black belt counties. He hoped that such efforts would generate a greater spirit of fairness toward Black public schools. In several ways Washington sought to expose the gross racial inequality in southern public education. For example, in 1909 he sent the members of the Southern Education Board evidence that in Lowndes County, Alabama, $20 per capita went to White schoolchildren and $0.67 per capita to Black schoolchildren. Lowndes was in Alabama’s Black belt, just two counties west of Macon. However, there was virtually nothing that Washington could do through letters and propaganda to slow the decline of Black public education. In earlier times, particularly from 1868 to 1890, Black communities were able to check assaults on their public school systems through political clout and legal safeguards. Ironically, it was Washington who made the observation in 1902 that “not one of his students had ever broke into jail or Congress.” Now, to protect the reform movement he cherished the most—the advancement of education in Black communities—he found himself needing the very political involvement he had once discouraged. Without political clout, Washington could only stand by and observe quietly, as he did in 1909, that the advancement of White education “is being made at the expense of Negro education, that is, the money is actually being taken from the colored people and given to white schools.”24 Historians have tended to see Washington’s accommodationist style of leadership as appropriate to the context of its time, that is, as a pragmatic response to the racial injustices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They maintain that given the basic inhumanity of the era, it is hard to see how Washington could have preached a radically different philosophy in his time and place. However, other leaders in the same era did articulate a radically different philosophy, including W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Taylor, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and John Hope, to name only a few. What is perplexing and interesting about Washington’s era is the manner in which African American leaders of similar social experiences developed such divergent understandings of and solutions to the problem of... Read more at location 188
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79. Ideology of African American Inferiority Early in his career Washington was forced to examine his perceptions of racial conflict and formulate a coherent explanation of racial inequality in America. As he put it, “One of the first questions that I had to answer for myself after beginning my work at Tuskegee was how I was to deal with public opinion on the race question.” For an answer to this question he resorted not to the social perceptions—folklore and slave-community perceptions of race and slavery—implicit in African American traditions or to his day-to-day experiences in an oppressive system of racial subordination but to the precepts and lessons he had learned at Hampton Institute under the tutelage of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a White Union officer in the Civil War who worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau in the South. The hallmarks of Washington’s leadership, his conservative social philosophy, his accommodation with White supremacy and racial segregation, and his belief in industrial education and skilled labor as a means to overcome racial and class discrimination were well developed in the 1870s and early 1880s. What Washington learned as a student at Hampton Institute from 1872 to 1875 and as a postgraduate from 1879 to 1881 were perceptions of race development, politics, economics, and education that tended to rationalize historical and contemporary oppression while offering hope in the distant future.25 According to historian Louis R. Harlan, Washington found in Armstrong “the great White father for whom he had long been searching.” Since Washington knew that his own father was White but was never certain of that man’s identity, it is plausible that he longed for this father figure. What is more certain, however, is that Washington was overwhelmed by Armstrong and began to model his conduct and thought on Armstrong’s. In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Washington said of Armstrong, “I shall always remember that the first time I went into his presence he made the impression upon me of being a perfect man; I was made to feel that there was something about him that was superhuman.” He described Armstrong as “the most perfect specimen of man, physically, mentally and spiritually” that he had ever seen, and he considered the best part of his education to have been the privilege of being permitted to look upon General Armstrong each day. Washington had the opportunity of observing Armstrong closely, for throughout his three years at Hampton he was a janitor in the academic building, close to the general and the other White teachers.26 A Liberal Justification for Racial Oppression: Darwinian Evolution One of the first and more enduring lessons Washington learned from Armstrong was the meaning of race, its significance throughout human history, and its bearing on relationships between European Americans and African Americans. Armstrong sincerely believed that race was the key to understanding morality, industry, thrift, responsibility, ambition, and the overall social worth of human beings. He believed that the human race was appropriately divided into the White and the darker races. The White races were civilized, superior because they had centuries of Christian moral development, hard work, selfgovernment, and material prosperity. The darker races, including Indians, Polynesians (Armstrong was a child of missionaries in Hawaii), and Africans, were weak in Christian morality, lacked industrious habits, and were incapable of self-government and political leadership. As Armstrong put it, “The [American] white race has had three centuries of experience in organizing the forces about him, political, social, and physical. The Negro has had three centuries of experience in general demoralization Read more at location 189
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85. theory of racial evolution was grounded in metaphors derived from Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, which swept the European American intellectual world and fed the roots of new liberal ideology. The main purpose of race-evolution theory was to provide a rational explanation of the unequal distribution of wealth and political power among racial groups. The Hampton faculty taught Black students that the subordinate position of their race in the South, even in places where they were the overwhelming majority, was not the result of oppression but of the natural process of moral and cultural evolution. In other words, Black people had only evolved to a cultural stage that was 2,000 years behind that of White people, and their inferior position in society therefore represented the natural order of social evolution. The darker races were likened to children who must crawl before they can walk, must be trained before they can be educated. For it was only after the backward races put away childish things, stilled their dark laughter, and subordinated their emotional nature to rational self-discipline that they would be ready to vote, hold political office, and enjoy the rights and privileges of firstclass citizenship. the highest civilization that the world knows anything about.” The Black race lagged behind the White race not because of slavery and racism but because a semibarbarous race naturally could not keep pace with a highly civilized race. While Washington did not condone the enslavement of African people, he maintained constantly that during slavery African Americans’ exposure to a highly civilized race gave them advantages over other uncivilized races. As he put it, The Indian refused to submit to bondage and to learn the white man’s ways. The result is that the greater portion of the American Indians have disappeared, the greater portion of those who remain are not civilized. The Negro, wiser and more enduring than the Indian, patiently endured slavery; and contact with the white man has given him a civilization vastly superior to that of the Indian.28 Although this viewpoint did not condone slavery, it portrayed it as a school where the allegedly uncivilized Africans received a jump start on the road to civilized life by imitating the best they found in White culture. “The Indian and the Negro met on the American continent for the first time at Jamestown, in 1619,” said Washington. “Both were in the darkest barbarism.” Two hundred fifty years later the “Negro race” had learned “to wear clothes, to live in a home, to work with a high degree of regularity and system, and a few had learned to work with a high degree of skill.” Not only this, the African race had learned a fair knowledge of American culture “and changed from a pagan into a Christian race.” Thus, in Washington’s mind slavery was a blessing in disguise since it gave “pagan” Africans the opportunity to have contact with highly civilized Europeans. This conception of history and progress as racial evolution led Washington to conclude that racial inequality was merely the natural order of evolutionary laws, which in turn would lead to equality as the darker, semibarbarous races became more civilized.29 Avoiding the Issue of Political Power Directly and closely related to this perception of racial evolution was the question of whether the freedmen should vote and pursue political office, since such rights and privileges were reserved for the fully civilized. In Armstrong’s view, the “colored people” should “let politics severely alone.” African American voters, he maintained, were “dangerous to the country in proportion to their numbers.” His desire to disfranchise the freedmen Read more at location 190
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91. Washington learned this lesson well while attending Hampton and internalized it as a lens through which he perceived and interpreted questions of race development, political inequality, and civil rights. As he said in 1900 before the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, “My friends, the white man is three thousand years ahead of us, and this fact we might as well face now as well as later, and at one stage of his development, either in Europe or America, he has gone through every stage of development that I now advocate for our race.” Instead of regarding the difficulties of his race as the result of arbitrary and unjust oppression, Washington interpreted them as the natural difficulties that almost every race had been compelled to overcome in its upward climb from uncivilized life. He cautioned White people not to overlook the fact “that geographically and physically the semi-barbarous Negro race has been thrown right down in the center of Read more at location 190
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97. followed logically from his premise that the freedmen and women were not civilized and therefore incapable of self-government. Washington also internalized this view of Black participation in the body politic. Although he was opposed to depriving Black men of the legal right of franchise, like Armstrong he advised that it was a mistake for them to enter actively into politics. Washington went beyond urging Black people not to vote or run for political office; he also counseled them not to speak out against racial injustice. Race prejudice, he believed, was something to be lived through, not talked down. In 1888, one of Tuskegee’s employees, George M. Lovejoy, wrote a letter to a Mississippi Black newspaper protesting the effort of a White mob in Tuskegee to take a Black man from the county jail. The local White newspaper, the Tuskegee News, asked if it was the purpose of Tuskegee Institute to breed hatred of the White race and warned Lovejoy to leave town. Washington sent a card to the Tuskegee News bearing this message: “It has always been and is now the policy of the Normal School to remain free from politics and the discussion of race questions that tend to stir up strife between the races, and whenever this policy is violated it is done without the approbation of those in charge of the school.” Thus, Washington publicly advised the general Black population to abstain from voting, running for political office, or speaking out against racial injustice. This directive, however, was not a blanket condemnation of political activity by all African Americans. The White registrars in his Alabama county gave him a special invitation to come in and awarded him a lifetime voting certificate, which he framed and hung in his home. Washington voted and urged a few selected African Americans to vote, but both publicly and privately he favored restrictions that would prevent the propertyless and illiterate of both races from voting.30 During Washington’s career as head of Tuskegee Institute, Macon County’s Black population increased from 74 percent of the county’s population in 1880 to 85 percent in 1910. The position he took encouraged the disfranchisement of the masses of Black voters. Meanwhile, the state constitution protected the White vote with various loopholes. The result was that the small White minority maintained exclusive control of the county’s political system during Washington’s era, a control that continued until after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Washington’s major complaint was that the Whites in power did not apply the voting restrictions equally to both races. Nevertheless, as state after state placed property and educational restrictions on voting, he refused to take a public stand against ratification of the undemocratic constitutions. He sincerely believed in the disfranchisement of the propertyless, the illiterate, and “backward” races and therefore found it difficult to fight publicly against restrictions on popular voting even when such restrictions were more racially qualified than he preferred. Indeed, to Washington, the worsening position of African Americans since emancipation seemed to result from the reaction of White voters against Black participation in the body politic. He did not object to educational or property tests because he believed that citizenship rights were to be secured by education, property, and character, not by constitutional guarantees. Black people, he insisted, needed moral training, education, and property before they would be ready to vote and hold political office.31 A Liberal Faith: Social Progress through the Marketplace The most critical dimension of Washington’s perceptions of his social environment was his belief that hard labor and the accumulation of property were the keys to resolving all social problems. Although this component of his social perceptions diverged from reality to a breathtaking degree, in order to understand it, it is necessary to see how Washington viewed his world and posed solutions based on those... Read more at location 191
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103. by natural laws, which individuals defied at their peril. These perfect laws disallowed anything so irrational as race prejudice. “When an individual produces what the world wants,” Washington believed, “the world does not stop long to inquire what is the color of the skin of the producer.” This perception distorted the fact that in reality the South was very conscious of skin color, especially in the realm of economics. The region had just emerged from two and a half centuries of slavery, a system of economic exploitation based exclusively on race. Washington saw slavery differently and interpreted it in a manner consistent with his perception of the natural laws of economics. In his view, Under God, as bad as slavery was, it prepared the way for the solving of this [race] problem by this [business] method. The two hundred and fifty years of slavery taught the Southern white man to do business with the Negro. If a Southern white man wanted a house built he consulted a Negro mechanic about the building of that house; if he wanted a suit of clothes made, he consulted a Negro tailor. And, thus, in a limited sense, every large plantation in the South during slavery was, in measure, an industrial school.33 Since emancipation, Washington perceived, “The Negro in the South has not only found a practically free field in the commercial world, but in the world of skilled labor.” He often told Black southerners that “when one comes to business pure and simple, stripped of all ideas of sentiment, the Negro is given almost as good an opportunity to rise as is given to the white man.” To Washington it followed that the South was a place where African Americans had equal opportunity to succeed in the labor market and the commercial world. “Whenever the Negro has lost ground industrially in the South,” said Washington in 1898, “it is not because there is prejudice against him as a skilled laborer on the part of the Native Southern white man, for the Southern white man generally prefers to do business with the Negro as a mechanic rather than with a white one.”34 What was peculiar about this article of faith was Washington’s belief that racially neutral laws of labor and commerce existed in the South, the land of slavery and peasantry, but not in the North, the land of capitalism and free labor. In almost every speech or essay in which he extolled equal economic opportunity for Black southerners, he was quick to point out that racial prejudice was a key barrier to Black economic progress in the North. The following story, which he told to a Brooklyn, New York, audience in 1896, is typical of Washington’s perception of economic opportunities for Black people in the North: Not long ago a mother, a black mother, who lived in one of your Northern states, had heard it whispered around in her community for years that the Negro was lazy, shiftless, and would not work. So when her boy grew to sufficient size, at considerable expense and great selfsacrifice, she had her boy thoroughly taught the machinist’s trade. A job was secured in a neighboring shop. . . . What happened? . . . Every one of the twenty white men threw down his tools and deliberately walked out, swearing that he would not give a black man an opportunity to earn an honest living. Another shop was tried, with the same results, and still another and the same.35 In such instances Washington did not ignore the fact that racism was present in the labor markets and contradicted his notion that the natural laws of labor and commerce precluded race prejudice. “Hundreds of Negroes in the North become criminals who would become strong Read more at location 192
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109. Throughout his career he held to the belief that race prejudice and discrimination did not influence occupational and commercial opportunities in the South.36 Although this perception of economic reality had virtually no basis in fact, Washington held to it unswervingly, in part because it was critical to his proposals for solving the problem of racial oppression. “There is almost no prejudice against the Negro in the South in matters of business, so far as the native whites are concerned, and here is the entering wedge for the solution of the race problem,” said Washington in 1898. Economic development and its foundation, industrial education, were viewed by Washington as the entering wedge for solving the race problem because he believed strongly that material prosperity was the real basis of civil and political equality. “In proportion as the ignorant secure education, property and character,” he said in 1898, “they will be given the right of citizenship.” This social perception and its inherent resolution shifted the question of citizenship from rights guaranteed by federal and state constitutional law to a reward granted for material success. Washington argued that when Black southerners demonstrated the virtues of good businesspeople by getting property, good jobs, nice houses, and bank accounts, White southerners would give Black people the ballot and other perquisites of full citizenship without a qualm. Consequently, he did not believe in political means toward liberation and equality, thinking that political action was at best a waste of time and at worst the cause of White backlash. “We have spent time and money in political conventions, making idle political speeches, that could have been better spent in becoming leading real estate dealers and leading carpenters and truck gardeners, and thus have laid an imperial foundation on which we could have stood and demanded our rights,” he proclaimed in 1898. He said that it was right that all the privileges guaranteed to Blacks by the U.S. Constitution be sacredly guarded. But the “mere fiat of law,” he cautioned, “could not make a dependent man an independent man” or “make one race respect another.” “One race respects another in proportion as it contributes to the markets of the world,” he contended. Washington alleged that “almost without exception, whether in the North or in the South, wherever I have seen a Negro who was succeeding in business, who was a taxpayer, a man who possessed intelligence and high moral character, that man was treated with respect by the people of both races.” Hence, respect and first-class citizenship would come to Blacks in proportion to their accumulation of property, education, and good jobs. In reality, from Reconstruction to 1915, Black people were acquiring significantly more property and education as they were being stripped of basic civil and political rights. As Washington perceived his social world, he stood reality on its head, believing that the accumulation of property and education would lead to respect and first-class citizenship precisely at the moment when the opposite was unfolding.37 The Washington Solution Perhaps because he accommodated so easily to the southern system of racial inequality, Washington romanticized the region’s economic life as providing a firm foundation for emancipation from racial oppression. Acquiescence in racial segregation was one of the prices he believed he had to pay for peace with White southerners. He also counseled Black people to stay away from politics and not to agitate for civil rights. Another concession was a rather sweeping abandonment of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. It was his policy to refrain from discussions of controversial racerelations questions, and he forbade his faculty and students from speaking out against racial injustice. In his imagined world of southern economics no law could push individuals forward if they were worthless and no law could hold them back if they were worthy. Thus his solutions for solving the... Read more at location 193
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115. teach skilled trades. The situation was similar with respect to the teaching of commercial or business subjects. In 1906, while assessing Tuskegee’s offerings 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. In reality, Tuskegee was neither a trade school nor a business school. It was a normal school, and its chief aim was to train teachers. Its philosophical commitment to industrial education translated in practice into a routine of hard unskilled and semiskilled labor that was designed to teach prospective teachers the social–psychological value of hard work. The teachers in turn were expected to translate the Tuskegee work ethic to the millions of African American schoolchildren in the South. In a word, Tuskegee’s industrial education was the teaching of the work ethic, not the teaching of trade and business skills. This constituted an accommodation to the South’s economic system based on racial inequality, not a foundation from which to achieve economic independence and civil rights.40 Thomas Harvey runs a neat little Grocery, he kept a Buggy and frequently rode to his place of business, he was warned to sell his buggy and walk. Mr. Chandler keeps a Grocery, he was ordered to leave, but was finally allowed to remain on good behavior. Mr. Meacham ran a business and had a Pool Table in connection therewith, he was ordered to close up and don overalls for manual labor. Mr. Cook conducted a hack business between the Depots and about town, using two vehicles, he was notified that he would be allowed to run only one and was ordered to sell the other. Another West Point businessman, a Black printer named Buchanan, had a piano in his home and allowed his daughter, who was his cashier and bookkeeper, to ride the family buggy to and from work until “a mass meeting of whites decided that the mode of living practiced by the Buchanan family had a bad effect on the cooks and washer women, who aspired to do likewise, and became less disposed to work for the whites.” A White mob forced the family to flee without allowing them even to pack. So much for the economic panacea for solving the race problem. Economic reality was a far cry from the gospel of thrift, industry, and wealth preached in Washington’s speeches and essays. The racist barriers against Black success in business stood tall and firm, and in the world of work the White South relegated the vast majority of Black people to the most disagreeable and poorest paid occupations.39 Underneath it all Washington, though preaching a gospel of material prosperity, seemed to accommodate to economic repression as he did to political and civil repression. Specifically, Tuskegee Institute did not attempt to supply the South with graduates trained in skilled trades or business leadership and therefore offered no direct competition to White dominance in those areas. Stories about Tuskegee were so filled with rhetoric about industrial education that both contemporary observers and later historians mistakenly assumed that trade, technical, and commercial training formed the essence of the institute’s curriculum. In fact, Tuskegee placed little emphasis on trade and commercial training. 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... Read more at location 195
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121. However, Du Bois and other Black leaders felt compelled to challenge Washington’s social, political, and educational perspectives—and to challenge the way in which he went about building and protecting Tuskegee. Developing an appreciation of Washington’s accomplishments while recognizing the source of Du Bois’s criticisms is a challenge to anyone who wishes to understand the history of education in the United States. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois Although Booker T. Washington was clearly the most prominent Black leader in the United States from 1895 until his death in 1915, his vocational-education approach to the social and economic problems of Black people did not appeal to all African Americans. By 1903, he was being criticized publicly by William E. B. Du Bois, an influential leader in his own right. “Among Negro Americans,” writes historian John Hope Franklin, “there could hardly be a greater contrast than the careers of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois” (pronounced by Du Bois himself to rhyme with “toys”).41 Unlike Washington, who had been born into Virginia slavery, Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he recalled more ethnic discrimination against the Irish than against the 25 to 50 Black inhabitants among the population of some 5,000 people.42 After excelling in school, Du Bois traveled south to attend Fisk University in Nashville, one of the historically Black institutions founded during Reconstruction. At Fisk, Du Bois studied a traditional liberal arts curriculum that emphasized the classics. He read Homer, Livy, and Sophocles but also studied the sciences, German, and philosophy. After graduating with a B.A., Du Bois entered Harvard University, but because he had graduated from a Black institution, he had to enroll as a junior. Majoring in philosophy, Du Bois graduated cum laude and then traveled to Berlin, where he pursued graduate study for two years. After returning to the United States, Du Bois received a Ph.D. degree at Harvard, and his dissertation on the African slave trade was later published as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Series. In 1897 Du Bois accepted a faculty position at Atlanta University, where he and his graduate students began authoring what would become a series of 18 volumes on African American life. He was at this time primarily a scholar and had little interest in political activism. “By 1905,” he wrote, “I was still a teacher at Atlanta University and was in my imagination a scientist, and neither a leader nor an agitator; I had much admiration for Mr. Washington and Tuskegee.”43 Despite that admiration, Du Bois was also critical of Washington. In his early Atlanta years Du Bois came to see that when he did disagree with the Black leader’s belief s, such disagreements were considered to be an attack on Washington and were interpreted by Washington’s followers as hostile to Black people in general. This stifling of criticism, perhaps more than any other fact of Washington’s organization, aroused Du Bois’s ire. As Du Bois records in his Autobiography, the “Tuskegee machine” was able to use White financial backing to buy up Black-owned newspapers that criticized Washington’s leadership. In 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois took Washington to task for stifling the “earnest criticism” that Du Bois believed was the “soul of democracy.”44 Unlike Booker T. Washington, who believed social and political success would follow naturally from economic success, W. E. B. Du Bois believed that economic and social gains would occur only as a result of political gains. Imagine that you are a student about to graduate from Tuskegee Institute in 1900. Would you urge a friend to go to Tuskegee or to the liberal arts–oriented Fisk University? Why? What reasons would you give? Read more at location 196
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