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ABSTRACT
This article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Joan Scott, Steve Kantrowitz, Jim Livingston, and Joan Bryant for feedback on this article's conceptualization and to Andrew Boyd, Jim Feldman, Steve Brier, and Dan Katz for their advice and comments on earlier drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
James Levy is an Assistant Professor of U.S. History, Race and Ethnicity and the Director of the Public History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and he completed his doctorate at Rutgers University. He is the founder of two community-based public history programs: The Diverse Suburbs Oral History Program, whose work was featured in a national exhibition at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture that he curated entitled Black Suburbia: From Levittown to Ferguson and The Wisconsin Farms Oral History Project, a state-wide community history project which examines the intersections between race, ethnicity, farming and food production. Levy is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Black Minds, Black Nation: African American Elites, the “Folk,” and the Politics of Knowledge, 1880–1915.
Notes
1. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 29.
2. Ibid., 40. Coppin’s original text employs the full phrase “prosy process of thinking, comparing, reasoning … ” The term “prosy” has lost much of its meaning today but it draws on nineteenth-century connotations as “methodical” or “painstaking.”
3. See, for example, Williams, Self-taught; Fairclough, A Class of Their Own; and Butchart, Schooling the Freed People.
4. As icon of black intellectual achievement, Miller was invited to present the first “Occasional Paper” for the American Negro Academy upon its founding in 1897. See also: entry on Kelly Miller noting his natural intellectual ability and “remarkable power of mind” in Gates, Men of Mark, Du Bois entry on Miller in “Possibilities of the Negro,” and, observations of Miller’s intellectual skill made by Alice Dunbar Nelson in 1901 in Dunbar, The Correspondence of Paul and Alice Dunbar.
5. Miller, The Education of the Negro, 805, 808.
6. Crummell, “Common Sense in Common Schooling,” 325–41.
7. Ibid.
8. Du Bois, The College-Bred Negro, 114.
9. Du Bois, The Negro Artisan.
10. For scholarship on the relationship between African American thought and American Pragmatism, see Lawson and Kochm, Pragmatism and the Problem, in particular Chapter 9 “Pragmatism and Race” by Paul Taylor, and, in a contemporary context, Glaude, In a Shade of Blue.
11. Bagby, “William G. Price,” 45–85. See also Annual Statements of the Kowaliga School, 1904–1908; Sznajderman and Atkins “William Benson and the Kowaliga School,” 52; and Du Bois, The Negro Artisan, 84–9.
12. This paradigm has extended beyond the borders of the United States. A growing body of literature has linked colonial schooling to imperialism and noted the colonizing and “civilizing” missions of white paternalists, their racialized agendas, and the centrality of industrial education to support those agendas. See Zimmerman, “A German Alabama in Africa,” and White, “Moving Up the Ranks,” 532. Another body of scholarship emerging in the last 15 years, best articulated in works by Sadaiya Hartman and Heather Cox Richardson, has discussed the replacement of externalized, directly coercive forms of control of black bodies during slavery with internalized ideas of the “work ethic” and self-policing during and after Reconstruction. These works have led to a rich turn of attention to consciousness and concepts of “discipline” and “guilt.” But vocational education has not been interrogated for all of its theoretical and intellectual dimensions. Rather scholars have left as self-evident that vocational education helped to condition minds to a “work ethic.” See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, and Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction.
13. Dennis, “Schooling Along the Color Line,” 153–4. See also Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery, and Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 3. The list of examples of books and articles which use this formulation to explain the politics of black education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is too long to include here but it is notable that many of them have relied almost entirely on Anderson’s work to make their claims. See, for example, the following texts: Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 142; Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 139–40; Bagby, “William G. Price,” 15–84. Leon Litwack in Trouble in Mind also adopts the Anderson thesis and described the academic curriculum that some black families insisted upon as “forbidden courses.” See Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 78–9, 84. See also Blair, “Though Justice Sleeps, 1880–1900,” Chapter 1 in Kelley and Lewis, To Make Our World Anew, 34; Holt, Children of Fire, 233–4; and Divine et al., The American Story, 504–5.
14. See Watkins, The White Architects, and West, The Education of Booker T. Washington, 191–4, as just two relatively recent examples.
15. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 25. For a similar formulation, see also Alexander Crummell in Oldfield, Civilization and Black Progress, 1, 5, and 185.
16. Norrell, Up from History. See also Brundage, Booker T. Washington and Black Progress.
17. Norrell, Up from History, 151.
18. Hudson West Productions A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, 2003 (PBS broadcast premier, May 24, 2010).
19. See Bagby, “William G. Price,” 15–84. For a similar account, see Wennersten, “The Travail of Black Land-Grant Schools,” 54–62.
20. Kelley and Lewis, To Make Our World Anew, 34.
21. See Washington, “Making Their Beds,” in Up From Slavery.
22. Note Du Bois’s emphasis “to attain self-consciousness manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” in Souls of Black Folk, 39. Du Bois further argued for the “inevitable and needful assertion of the self in each of us” which he equated with a realization of “soul” and a rising consciousness. To Du Bois, consciousness was directly linked to manhood, “energy,” independence, self-possession and will. “The great Lack of the Negro race and of nearly all the darker races today is Energy, self-assertiveness, the command and use of at least its more conspicuous powers.” (See Du Bois, “The Hampton Idea” (1906) in The Education of Black People, 6–15.) Kelly Miller also used invoked the idea of “self-consciousness”: “Knowledge necessarily awakens self-consciousness of power … It is knowledge that must rouse the Negro to self-conscious activity.” (See Miller, The Education of the Negro, 805–6.)
23. On the devastating impact of the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, see Wells, Crusade for Justice and Fortune, Black and White, 14.
24. Jones, Labor of Love, 79–82.
25. Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 86.
26. See Robert McMath on the Colored Farmers’ Alliance in Populist Vanguard, 44–6. See Jones, Labor of Love, on the Washerwomen’s Association of Atlanta, 148.
27. See Roger, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 63–5.
28. Crummell, “The Social Principle among a People” (1875), in Oldfield, Civilization and Progress, 41.
29. On late nineteenth century discourse on black mortality and racial dissolution, see Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 31–5. On disease and fears of “extinction,” see Giggie, After Redemption, 144. On “racial destiny,” see Mitchell, Righteous Propagation. Fannie Barrier Williams worried about social and racial dissolution through racial mixing in cities in “Perils of the White Negro,” 421–3.
30. As scholars have noted, regional and national black conventions in the late 1870s and 1880s were notable for their emphasis on workers. See Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 169. August Meier also includes long passages on black conventions during these years which similarly reveals the central emphasis on black workers. See Meier, Negro Thought in America, 35, 44–6.
31. See Painter, Exodusters.
32. Proceedings of the National Conference, 61.
33. Ibid, 4–5, 22–8, and 100–5.
34. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States. (This table was prepared in September 1992.) Note the percentage for only foreign-born whites was 12.5%. See URL: http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
35. Quoted in Painter, Exodusters, 44.
36. This debate was published in May 1880 in the pages of the Journal of Social Science in 1880, 1–35. Note that the original Saratoga Springs conference in Sept 1879 included Douglass on the bill. He did not show but sent his paper to be read by a proxy.
37. Douglass, “The Negro Exodus,” 8.
38. Greener, “The Emigration of Colored Citizens,” 16–35.
39. Ibid., 20.
40. “Social Principle Among a People,” 114, quoted in Moses, Alexander Crummell, 93. See also Norrell, Up from History, 151.
41. Moses, Alexander Crummell, 93.
42. See Chapter 3 in Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 63–72. See also the introduction to Katz and Sugrue, W.E.B. Du Bois, Race and the City.
43. Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 63–6.
44. Du Bois notes that in 1890s 50% of Philadelphia workforce in industrial employment but only 8.2% of black residents. Note also in the 1890s four out of five black men under age 20 worked as porters, errand boys, domestic servants, or common laborers. Eighty percent of all adult black men worked as unskilled laborers or servants. (See Katz and Sugrue, W.E.B. Du Bois, Race and the City, 10–12.) Note also the actual decline in skilled black labor: The 1870 census lists well over 250 occupations for black men and women. By 1898 the number was down to 130 – less than half of what it had been – despite large increases in the black population during those years. (See Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, Chapter 3.)
45. Crummell, “The Dignity of Labor,” in Oldfield, Civilization and Black Progress, 65.
46. See William James on objects, sensation, and perception, Principles, 2–5. See also John Dewey, who exalts the “act of production” as “being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment … ” Dewey continues, “After all, even though ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ are separated and set in opposition to one another, there must be conditions through which the ideal is capable of embodiment and realization – and this is all, fundamentally, that ‘matter’ signifies.” Dewey, “The Live Creature and ‘Ethereal Things’” in Art as Experience, 27.
47. Crummell, “The Dignity of Labor … ,” 67–8.
48. Ibid., 66.
49. Williams, “Industrial Education,” 491–2.
50. Proceedings of the National Conference, 24.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Williams, “Industrial Education,” 81.
54. Ibid.
55. Crummell, “Common Sense in Common Schooling” in Oldfield, Civilization and Black Progress, 135.
56. Ibid., 137.
57. Ibid., 140.
58. See Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune.
59. Ibid., 54–5.
60. Seth Moglen in Introduction to Fortune, Black and White, v–vi.
61. Fortune, Black and White, 30.
62. Ibid., 6.
63. Ibid., 35.
64. Ibid., 79.
65. Ibid.,. 45–6.
66. Ibid., 73.
67. Bullock, The History of Negro Education, 90–1, 100–1, 128. See also Woolfolk, Prairie View, 63, 79. On the Capon Springs Conferences, see also Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 82–4; Bullock, The History of Negro Education, 90–1, 100–1. On the vogue of industrial education nationwide including the increased interest in white worker and white student training, see Kliebard, Schooled to Work, and Tyack, The One Best System. See in particular Kliebard’s discussion of the power struggles between American manufacturers’ associations and labor unions (Kliebard, Schooled to Work, 28–30).
68. For listings of African American industrial schools in post-Civil War nineteenth century America, see: Miller, The Education of the Negro, Report of the Committee on Industrial Education, and U.S. Bureau of Education, Education Reports (1892–1893 report through 1900–1901 report). Du Bois’ Negro Artisan (1902) and Negro American Artisan (1912) also include detailed tables offering statistical summaries of African American industrial schools. Two classic historic overviews of African American education also offer excellent details on industrial schools and their founding: Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race, and Bond, The Education of the Negro.
69. See Sewell, The World’s Congress, 715–17. For more biographical information on Coppin, see Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin, 24–8. See also Perkins, “The Black Female American Missionary Association” in Hine, Black Women.
70. Willis, Cheyney, 44–50.
71. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 19–20.
72. Ibid., 23. On Philly and education context see also Franklin, The Education of Black Philadelphia, x, 16.
73. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 28.
74. Ibid., 37.
75. Ibid., 28, 61.
76. Ibid., 24.
77. See Franklin, Education of Black Philadelphia, 99–100.
78. Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 146.
79. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 24.
80. Ibid., 37.
81. For another example, note the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in Bordentown, New Jersey, whose principal, James Monroe Gregory (1898–1913), a trained classicist and former Dean at Howard University, also faced resistance from his board of managers when he tried to expand the agricultural and industrial offerings at his school. See School Report, 1903, the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School, 173–4; Commencement Program, 1903, the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School, 2; and, the Ironside Echo student newspaper (1908 issue). All in the Bordentown MTIS Papers, New Jersey State Archives, Newark, NJ. See also Henry Davison’s fundraising efforts at the Centreville Institute in Alabama (Eighth Annual Report of Centreville Industrial Institute, 1907–1908, the Centreville Industrial Institute Papers, 11).
82. See Institute for Colored Youth, Managers' minutes, 144–6.
83. Forty-ninth Annual Report, the Institute for Colored Youth, 1900–1901, ICY, Managers' minutes, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
84. Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 151, 158.
85. Coppin, Reminiscences of School Life, 29.
86. Ibid., 44.
87. Ibid., 58, 64, 68.
88. Ibid., 91.
89. McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 148–9.
90. Quoted in McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 172–3.
91. Holtzclaw, “The Growth of the Normal and Industrial School Idea,” 118.
92. Ibid.
93. Addams, Twenty Years, 64.
94. See Dewey, “My Pedagogical Creed” in The Philosophy of John Dewey. Originally published in School Journal, LIV (January 1897), 87–8. H.H. Belfield of the Chicago Manual Training School argued for integration of manual and industrial training into mainstream curriculum of public schools:
[E]ducation is not simply the acquisition of knowledge … It is the complete, systematic, and harmonious development of every faculty of the child, mental, moral and physical … Knowledge at first hand is the best knowledge. Too often does the text-book stand between the child and the thing itself. Belfield, Manual Training, 22.
95. Dewey and Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 150–66.
96. Minutes of the Board of Managers, June 17, 1902, ICY, Managers' minutes.
97. Ibid. For Gilman’s views on industrial education, see also Gilman, A Plea for the Training.
98. See Hawkins, Between Harvard and America, and Clark, “The Educational Philosophy of Leslie Pinkney Hill.”
99. See Sewell, The World’s Congress, 711–14.
100. Cooper, A Voice from the South, 30. Though Cooper herself has been accused by some scholars as elitist in her own right, hints of anti-elitism which, like Crummell, Fortune, Browne, and others, targeted intellectual practice appear in her writings. At one moment in A Voice from the South, she ridiculed the intellectual pretenses of the mid-nineteenth century black upper crust: “‘Scale the heights!’ was the cry. ‘Go to college, study Latin, preach, teach, orate, wear spectacles and a beaver!’” See Cooper, A Voice from the South, 260.
101. Cooper, “More Letters.”
102. Browne, “Method of Education.” Assuming leadership of the Institute for Colored Youth after Coppin’s departure, Browne recruited progressive northern white educators including Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins and John Dewey of the University of Chicago to make up an “advisory educational committee in arranging a new course of study.” Within two years, ICY students followed a combined industrial and academic curriculum that included courses in physics, chemistry, world history, and literature. See Minutes of the Board of Managers, June 17, 1902, ICY, Managers' minutes.
103. Browne, “Method of Education.”
104. Yates, “Thought Power in Education,” 242–7.
105. Ibid., 243, 245.
106. On the “politics of respectability” see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, and Gaines, Uplifting the Race.
107. See Kliebard, Schooled to Work, 24–5, 28–30, and Ravitch, Left Back, 78.
108. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 48; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 32–4; West, The Education of Booker T. Washington, 191–4; Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 146; and Watkins, The White Architects.
109. “Opposition to Industrial Education,” 26.
110. Dixon, “Booker T. Washington and the Negro.”
111. Quoted in Norrell, “Understanding the Wizard Another Look at the Age of Booker T. Washington,” in Brundage, Booker T. Washington and Black Progress, 65.
112. Du Bois, Proceedings of the National Negro Conference 1909, 83–5.
113. Barrows, First Mohonk Conference.
114. See “The Conference for Education” in “The Way of the World” (front section) of The Colored American Magazine, June 1905, 291–2.
115. Proceedings of the Second Capon Springs Conference, 74. Quoted in Bullock, A History of Negro Education, 102.
116. Winston, “Industrial Training in Relation to the Negro Problem,” 103–7. Quoted in Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 85.
117. See Campbell et al., Race, Nation, and Empire, 6–7, and Watkins, The White Architects.
118. Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism, 39–46; Kliebard, Schooled to Work, 17–18; Dennis, “Schooling Along the Color Line,” 153; Lawson, “Booker T. Washington: A Pragmatist at Work” in Lawson and Koch, Pragmatism and the Problem, 125–41.
119. See also Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction, and her re-reading of Up from Slavery regarding Washington’s “free-labor” ideology. See Booker T. Washington on labor: “‘O Lawd, de cotton am so grassy, de work am so hard, and the sun am so hot dat I b’lieve dis darky am called to preach!’” in Washington, Up From Slavery, 67. See also William Henry Lewis, “An Account of Washington’s North Carolina Tour,” 455.
120. See Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 82–7. See also Clark, “The Educational Philosophy of Leslie Pinkney Hill,” 55–7. Clark notes that G. David Houston, another Harvard graduate and member of the academic department at Tuskegee, complained that Washington held “absolute control over his teachers” and kept them in “a modified form of slavery.”
121. Washington, “How Denmark Has Taught Itself,” 246.
122. Ibid., 244.
123. Ibid., 247.
124. See Moton, “The Post-Graduate Trade School,” in Du Bois, The Negro Artisan, 62. For the long philosophical roots of manual and industrial education, consult a helpful online overview by Stephen Fardo of Eastern Kentucky University. His summary notes that manual training ideas appeared in the ideas of such thinkers as Rabelais, Friedrich Froebel, Johan Herbart, John Dewey, and others. See http://people.eku.edu/fardos/tte261/updated/lesson4.htm. See also Gilman, A Plea for the Training, 3–15.
125. Du Bois, Negro Artisan, 25. Kowaliga, Alabama is 38 miles northwest of Tuskegee. Note also “Du Bois' point that over half of all Slater gifts went to Hampton and Tuskegee alone. The Artisan’s analysis of total school budgets in 1899–1900 recorded that Hampton and Tuskegee had combined expenditures of $620,000 compared to $843,000 for all other black schools, including colleges, combined (approximately 80 schools were included in the table). That’s over 42% of all total combined expenditures for black educational institutions. Hampton’s budget was $426,000 and Tuskegee’s was $202,000. The third largest budget was that of Howard University whose budget was $49,000. Atlanta University’s budget was about $31,600 in 1899–1900. (Du Bois, Negro Artisan, 67–8.)
126. Du Bois, Negro Artisan, 20.
127. Ibid., 46–8.
128. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 36.
129. Ibid., 38.
130. Note the founding of the Association of Negro Industrial and Secondary Schools in 1913. (See Hill, “Letter of Invitation to Friends.”)
131. On Wright and Ransom, see also Fullinwider, Mind and Mood, 41–5. See also August Meier on the political shifting and nuanced differences between the Church Record and the Church Review (both A.M.E.) in these years (Meier, Negro Thought in America, 233). Ransom has been described by August Meier as “the brilliant radical orator,” by David Levering Lewis as “tall, handsome, theatrical, and already recognized as the AME Church’s most charismatic preacher,” (Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 318) and by Allan Spear as “an active proponent of the social gospel, an ardent reformer and an articulate spokesman for the Negro militants” (Spear, Black Chicago, 63). See Spear’s biographical sketch of Ransom (Spear, Black Chicago, 63). Also note Ransom's own autobiography The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son (1950).
132. Clark, “The Educational Philosophy of Leslie Pinkney Hill,” 57. Several Harvard graduates, including Roscoe Conkling Bruce and G. David Houston, taught together in Tuskegee’s academic department (led by Bruce). All three men became quickly frustrated with Washington’s restriction of academics and left the school within five years. See Clark, “The Educational Philosophy of Leslie Pinkney Hill,” 55–7. For the situation at Manassas at the time of Hill’s take-over, see Clark again, “The Educational Philosophy of Leslie Pinkney Hill,” 61–90.
133. Mary McLeod Bethune to L.P. Hill, December 8, 1913, the Leslie Pinkney Hill Papers. See also John Hope to L.P. Hill, November 7, 1913; L.P. Hill to Mary White Ovington, January 8, 1914. All from the Association of Negro Industrial and Secondary Schools, Hill, “Letter of Invitation to Friends.” Board members, as written on the letter’s masthead, included: President W.H. Holtzclaw, Utica, MI; V.P. Miss Emma Wilson, Mayesville, S.C.; Sec-Treas.: L.P. Hill, Manassas; others: W.T. Williams, Hampton, Va; W.A Hunt, Fort Valley, Ga; W.J. Edwards, Snow Hill, Al.; O.L. Coleman, Gibsland, La.
134. On Kemp see Katz, All Together Different, 124–5, 136, and 146.
135. Du Bois “The Hampton Idea” (1906) in Aptheker, The Education of Black People, 12.
136. Du Bois, “Education and Work,” 64. Commence Address delivered at Howard University, Washington, DC, June 6, 1930. Reprinted by the Journal of Negro Education (August 1930).
137. Ibid., 64.
138. Ibid., 66.
139. Ibid., 70.
140. Ibid., 65.
141. Ibid., 69.