negro education and the progressive movement

Negro Education and the Progressive MovementAuthor(s): Harvey WishSource: The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jul., 1964), pp. 184-200Published by: Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2716656 .

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NEGRO EDUCATION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

The tortuous course followed by Southern Negro education a generation following Emancipation illustrates the peculiar path taken by the race in a harsh struggle for survival. By 1900 grim realities had dampened the postbellum enthusiasm of the freedmen for the liquidation of illiteracy. Most confusing was the lack of reliable data about Negro schools, although keen observers like Du Bois and Kelly Miller knew that many of them simply did not exist except on paper. By 1890 it had become reasonably clear that the progress of Negro education had been blocked by the current strife between the paternalistic Bourbons who used the Negro vote in return for jobs and some school concessions and the small white farmers and their demagogic leaders who combined economic reforms with an unyielding race policy.

Even with the best of intentions, Southern rural whites lacked the taxable resources for adequate biracial schools, but the race question as usual distorted their purposes. Some took refuge in the comforting myth expressed by Jabez L. M. Curry, Southern head of the Slater Fund for Negroes: "Noth- ing in the history of civilization," he said in 1899 of the allegedly generous Southern support of Negro schools, "is comparable to this sublime self-denial and this work of en- larged patriotism." This mollified the Populistic small farmers who smarted under Northern liberal attack on their race policies as they worked to weaken the Bourbons' ally through disfranchisement, intimidation, the elimination of many tra- ditional Negro jobs, and new race controls through a rigid Jim Crow system. Racist ideas spurred on by the New Im- perialism both here and abroad encouraged new emphasis upon innate Negro inferiority that justified the diversion of Southern school funds from Negro schools by the Vardamans and their supporters. At the same time, the country-to-city movement drove so many whites out of racially-mixed rural areas that there remained huge isolated Negro communities left to their own resources to build schools and other local institutions.

Wealthy Northern philanthropists and missionary agen- 184



NEGRO EDUCATION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 185

cies aided Negro communities to advance education, provide teachers, and establish colleges. The well-known work of the Peabody, Slater, Rockefeller, Jeanes and, much later, the Rosenwald foundations brought the Negro closer to the modern free world, although they afforded an excuse for smaller state appropriations to the race. A Southern maverick like George Washington Cable of Louisiana disturbed the conscience of the sensitive in behalf of adequate Negro education. Even the Bourbon-minded Jabez L. M. Curry devoted much of his life to the cause of Negro education, especially during the 1880's and 1890's when he served as the general agent of the Peabody and Slater Funds-the latter devoted entirely to the black. Curry forgot his old states' rights and secessionist sentiments vainly to urge Congress to pass the Blair Bill for federal aid to public schools, particularly for the most illiterate states. But he confessed grave doubts as to the Negro's educability-a serious handicap for the cause. The head of the Slater Fund, Rutherford B. Hayes, who had won the presidency by killing the final remnants of Recon- struction, had then assured anxious Negroes that their rights would be safer in the hands of the South than in those of the federal government. It is not surprising to read the headline of a Baltimore paper of November 1, 1890, which summarized his unenthusiastic opinion of Negro potentialities: "Ex- President Hayes Says Their Chief and Almost Only Gift is Oratory." In this mood he offered an education abroad to any Nogro sufficiently gifted to merit it; thereupon young W. E. B. Du Bois fresh from Fisk and Harvard persuaded Hayes that he could qualify and reassured him that he was only partly of Negro ancestry. Men like Curry and Hayes, despite their humane ideals, shared the racial stereotypes of the day and felt that religious and manual arts training should suffice for the freedmen. Nevertheless they made possible, through support of colleges like Fisk, the education of noted Negro leaders.

None could deny that Negro illiteracy dropped from ninety to forty per cent by 1900, but it was apparent that too many of the newly-literate were still vainly struggling to read and write at a high enough level to qualify for jobs in the complex world of the large-scale factories and administra-



186 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY

tive offices in the cities. White children in the new mill towns were not too far ahead of the freedmen's offspring, but jobs were assured for them under the tightening system of Jim Crow. With the passing of Bourbon power, rural politicians diverted tax funds increasingly to white schools and left Negro communities to struggle along with low-paid semi-literate teachers whom Booker T. Washington regarded as worse than nothing while the children tried to learn in crowded broken-down shacks or abandoned houses without the simplest equipment.

Thus in 1880-95, while the number of white pupils doubled in ten Southern states, Negro enrollment grew at only half this rate. Most Southern states imitated Missis- sippi's Constitution of 1890 which established local taxation and local school control to offset Bourbon state influence and to reduce the share of tax funds for Negro schools. Statis- tics, as Du Bois and others noted by personal observation, concealed the fact that many Negro schools reported did not actually exist and that salaries for Negro teachers were kept down by a new system of discrimination that withheld the better-paid teaching certificates from them. White school boards ran the Negro schools, selected Negro teachers indif- ferently, and weakened Negro leadership. Able Negroes escaped to better-paid jobs in the towns and sometimes found good salaries in the increasing number of purely Negro busi- nesses. Anything seemed better than working for a few dol- lars a week during an annual school year for Negro children that lasted about three months.

To make matters worse, the poverty of the rural Negro compelled needy parents to keep their children out of school or to withdraw them after the third or fourth grade to help support the family. Many Negro children felt no enthusiasm for the cause of education as they plowed through books and subjects that told them little about themselves and merely

1 L. D. Rubin, Jr., (ed.) Teach the Freeman: The Correspondence of Ruther- ford B. Hayes and the Slater Fund for Negro Education: 1881-1887 (2 vols., Louisiana State University Press, 1959), especially II, 158-161, 194-195; Kelly Miller, "Forty Years of Negro Education," Educational Review 36 (1908), 484- 498; Truman M. Pierce et al, White and Negro Schools (Prentiss-Hall, 1955), 40; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951), passim.




whetted their appetites for a world which they could not hope to enter. Frustration, particularly in the towns and cities, sometimes ended in delinquency and crime.

Amid a steadily worsening situation for the race, the conservative Booker T. Washington pleased apprehensive Southern whites by offering an Atlanta Compromise which gave up agitation for equality in return for jobs. Symboli- cally, this was 1895, the year that Frederick Douglass, mili- tant abolitionist, died. Assuming that Negroes would continue to live in the rural South for many decades to come, Washington stressed agricultural education and domestic sciences and his incurable optimism led him to cling to a kind of vocational training based on outmoded classroom equipment that was already obsolete in the newer factories and shops. This optimism led him to minimize the current lynchings, disfranchisement, and lack of opportunities for the skilled Negro. Yet he based everything on the theory of the eco- nomically-indispensable Negro, patiently ignoring provoca- tions, and somehow overcoming job discriminations. Realisti- cally, however, he urged employers to hire Negroes because they were immune to strikes and unions-which barred the race from skilled work. Shortsighted as this strategy was from the standpoint of the welfare of the total labor movement, it had definite immediate survival virtues. Much more realistically, and in anticipation of John Dewey's Learning By Doing, he trained Tuskegee teachers to stress the familar experiences and skills of the farm and the Negro community. Pupils learned arithmetic much better by studying everyday problems of selling hogs and crops raised in Ala- bama or of measuring schoolrooms. They knew the little tri- umphs of a small Negro rural society in producing better pigs and chickens and a more bountiful corn crop.

Critics were unfair to Booker T. Washington in assuming that he was indifferent to higher education. After all he sent his children to college, his wife introduced ideas that she had brought home from Fisk, and he served as a trustee for Howard University in whose future he was deeply inter- ested. He too knew the importance of what Du Bois called the Talented Tenth. But he gave the impression that classical learning was a waste of time for the Negro and perhaps he




enjoyed too much the jokes he told about the traffic in higher degrees among wholly unqualified Negro colleges. For his time-he died in 1915-he was an indispensable man, even if Northern Negro intellectuals complained that he was a leader created and maintained by wealthy white men. None denied that his successes were phenomenal in attracting large scale gifts for Negro schools, that he raised the morale of Southern rural Negroes, and that he obtained a new hear- ing for his race from the highest federal and state officials that had been lacking since the days of Reconstruction.2

Like the idealistic Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, then considered the most influential spokesman for American education, Booker T. Washington felt that the Negro must acquire the same economic motives as the domi- nant majority-thrift, discipline, and competition-to become as far as possible a small capitalist. Unlike Du Bois, who could be much more profound on certain aspects of race strategy, he was a genuine mass leader. But he was too eager to believe and repeat that education in a broad sense could solve the complex race question.

Washington is especially associated with the Great De- bate at the turn of the century over industrial education versus a literary schooling. While the director of Tuskegee regarded industrial education (largely farm and home skills) as an indispensable stage in the Negro's progress to a higher culture, southern leaders (and many Northerners too) like the Bourbon novelist, Thomas Nelson Page, believed that a training in simple skills befitted the innately inferior nature of the Negro and met the local needs of the South. In 1904, the demagogic Governor Vardaman of Mississippi aroused controversy between liberals and racists by vetoing a modest bill providing $10,000 to support the Negro normal school at Holly Springs. To the extreme white suprematists who had

2 E. D. Washington (ed.), Selected Speeches of Booker T. Washington (Gar- den City, 1932); Booker T. Washington, "Education Will Solve the Race Prob- lem," North American Review, 171 (1900), 221-232; id., "Educate Six Million Negro Children," World's Work 20 (1910), 13087-13088; id., "Chapters From My Experience," ibid., 21 (1910-11), 13783-13794; T. J. Calloway, "Booker T. Wash- ington and the Tuskegee Institute," New England Magazine, 23 (1897), 131-146. 0. G. Villard describes a rival to Tuskegee in "An Alabama Negro School," Re- view of Reviews, 26 (1902), 711-714.




brought him to power, his arguments regarding Negro inferiority seemed convincing:

Literary education-the knowledge of books-does not seem to produce any good substantial results with the negro, but serves rather to sharpen his cunning, breeds hopes that cannot be gratified, creates an inclination to avoid honest labor, pro- motes indolence, and in turn leads to crime.3

His followers failed to understand that racial discrimination destroyed much of the Negro's incentives to fulfill his best potentialities.

The aristocratic Philip A. Bruce, editor of the Richmond Times and a prolific historian who glorified the wealthy planter class from which his family came, used racist arguments to urge the simplest subjects for Negroes in a caste system. Sentimental educators had failed, he said, because they thought that the Southern Negro was "simply an ig- norant white man with a black skin." As a result the new Negro lacking the slaveholder's watchful eye, was inferior to the slave in steadiness, thrift, and discipline. Bruce called for more religious instruction, enough industrial training to inculcate good habits, and a second Peabody or Slater Fund to educate Negro preachers in religious seminaries rather than to provide more normal schools.4

Edward A. Alderman, the noted educator who was then president of Tulane, annoyed Northern journals by arguing that the money spent on Negro education had been wasted because the current stage of Negro development did not war- rant a literary education at the expense of an industrial education, Negroes must start "in the very kindergarten of racial development" under white supervision.5 In Georgia, Profes- sor John R. Straton of Mercer University used racist ideas to blame inherent Negro traits for the current rape cases and the consequent lynchings. Negroes must be urged to emigrate

3 Editorial, "A Blow at Negro Education," Current Literature, 36 (1904), 491.

4 See footnote commentaries to W. T. Harris, "Education of the Negro," Atlantic Monthly, 69 (1892), 721-736. The naive assumptions of contemporary psychologists may be inferred from Anne T. Smith, "A Study in Race Psychology," Popular Science Monthly, 50 (1897), 354-360.

5E. A. Alderman, "Education for White and Black," The Independent, 53 (1901), 2647-2649.




and the rest should remain under tighter segregation rules.6 Two leading New Orleans newspapers praised Vardaman's ideas of the fultility of Negro literary education. The New Orleans Times-Democrat commended the city's school board for restricting Negro schools to primary grades and lamented that some higher education was being provided in that me- tropolis by "misguided friends of the Negro in the North." Such advanced schooling, insisted the editor, merely unfitted the Negro for the work he was intended to do.7

It is remarkable that the South did not go ahead with a more thorough system of caste than it did considering that racists had valuable allies in the North and in the current British and French empire-builders in Africa and Asia. Even among enlightened historians like Rhodes, Schouler, Dun- ning, and Burgess there seemed to be no inconsistency between their stated antislavery views and their belief that Negroes were inherently inferior and that Reconstruction was a tragic mistake. Both sections read avidly Thomas Dixon's extreme racist books like The Leopard's Spots and his Negrophobe novel, The Clansman, which became the notorious motion picture Birth of la Nation that won the praise of a former college historian, President Woodrow Wilson as a wonderful way to teach history. Dixon had much more influence than others in spreading the idea that the Negro was vicious and totally uneducable.

Fortunately there were educators and editors in both sections who resisted the current racist crusade. Commissioner of Education William T. Harris wrote in The Atlantic Monthly of June 1892 that nothing less than a combined industrial and liberal education would do for the Negro. Ne- groes must master labor-saving machinery and skills to escape drudgery and to use brain power and directive intelligence. He shared the then current psychological notion that the Ne- gro was imitative by nature and argued that the growing racial segregation would return the Negro to African primi- tivism. Hence better schools, longer terms, liberal learning,

6 J. R. Straton, "Will Education Solve the Race Problem?" North American Review, 170 (1900), 785-801.

7 "A Blow at Negro Education," Current Literature, loc. cit.; F. Carter, "Negro Education in the South," The Nation, 78 (1904), 62-63.




including the classics, were needed. "But I do insist," he wrote, "on the practical fact that the negro of the South is not an African in his inner consciousness, but an American who has acquired our Anglo-Saxon consciousness in its Amer- ican type through seven generations of domestic servitude in the family of a white master."8

Outstanding Negro educators like Kelly Miller, Dean of Howard University, and DuBois of Atlanta University proved much more realistic and penetrating in their psychological assumptions and programs for their race. Miller, in his thoughtful articles and in several reports for the Commis- sioner of Education, makes keen observations from an inside viewpoint. He recognized the backwardness of Southern white schools as well as those for Negroes but noted that expendi- tures for the Negro child were half that for the white. A prejudiced environment doomed Negro children to an education for non-existent jobs or compelled the child to create a place both for himself and for those who came after him. Only teachers with a sense of mission could raise such children from their lethargy by combatting mere memorization and intellectual indigestion. First of all, modern kindergarten training was doubly important for the Negro to reach him in his most impressionable years. He needed to be taught manual training skillfully because for many years to come this would be his chief function in society; and girls must have the domestic sciences. Negro schools and colleges had their mission to help the Negro discover his tradition and heroes and to aid his understanding of the peculiar racial circumstances that surrounded him. Besides, even the liberal North- ern colleges would undoubtedly refuse to enroll all the Ne- groes who wished to enter. Higher learning for qualified Ne- groes was far from impractical. Speaking of the so-called practical schools such as Hampton and Tuskegee, he ob- served, "I venture the assertion that not one such graduate in ten finds an opportunity to ply the trade which he learned in school." The supply of labor does not create a demand and literary training was not less practical than industrial,

8 W. T. Harris, "Education of the Negro," loc. cit.




he noted, in fitting children for non-restricted jobs. Besides, there was the human element:

The negro is a man and is entitled to all the privileges of mankind . Why should the larger elements of his nature be left unnurtured while the mechanical side only is developed.3 Truth and justice do not hinge upon industrialism and trade; he pleads for righteous laws and is given an industrial school.

Kelly Miller pointed out the decline in skilled jobs since slavery and Reconstruction: "The negro is being driven out of his erstwhile industrial strongholds. The colored coachman, barber, waiter, and private domestic is a vanishing quantity in all the large cities." Industrial schools might train children in method but they could not overcome racial handicaps. Besides, escape to the cities was no panacea, for it meant the temptations of vice, crowded squalor, and uncertain employment. He noted that the current Hampton Negro Confer- ence had called upon county teachers and preachers to advise Negroes to develop their farm and local industrial resources and not to be deceived by the glare and glitter of city life. In addition, he stressed the need for educating colored women since they controlled teaching and many showed rare talents as authors, lecturers, businesswomen, and administrators. As for the future role of Negro colleges, Kelly Miller agreed with Booker T. Washington that there were now too many fourth-rate schools recklessly conferring the highest degrees regardless of intellectual attainment. Miller noted that the Southern white colleges also suffered from the same disease, but he thought it was worse with the higher learning of his people.9

Du Bois, whom Kelly Miller greatly admired and fre- quently cited, made a most persuasive and poetic plea for higher education. He did not quarrel with Booker T. Wash- ington over the need of vocational training for the masses, but

9 Kelly Miller, "The Education of the Negro," in Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1900-1901 (Washington, 1902), I, 737 et seq.; id., Race Adjust- ment (Neale, New York, 1908), particularly the Open Letter to Thomas Dixon; id., "The Function of the Negro College," The Dial, 32 (1902), 259-270. The arguments for higher education appear in H. B. Frissell, "Negro Education," Out- look, 74 (1903), 937-939; 0. G. Villard, "Higher Education for the Negro," The Nation, 74 (1902), 381-382; W. S. Scarborough," Negroes and Higher Learning," The Forum, 33 (1902), 349-355.




he suspected that the "Tuskegee Machine" had no real inter- est in training Negro leaders at the highest cultural levels. He noted bitterly in 1902, "And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black." For those who doubted the Negro's capacities, he showed that within one generation of plantation slavery, 400 Negroes had earned their B.A. from the very best colleges-Harvard, Yale, and Oberlin. Al- together 2500 of the race possessed college degrees and despite all barriers were teachers, school administrators, cler- gymen, doctors, lawyers, and merchants. "I sit with Shake- speare," he wrote in his sensitive way, "and he winces not Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas where smiling men and welcoming women glide in ... Is this the life you grudge us, o knightly America Is this the life you long to change into the dull hideousness of Georgia ?"

He complained that it was difficult for him to continue as a social scientist studying objectively the race problem when the constant news of lynching drove him to seek action. But it was fortunate for his people that he gave them the benefit of his I :sic contributions to an understanding of the Negro, notably his work at the University of Pennsylvania on the Philadelphia Negro, which helped scholars of both races to reach sounder conclusions on race; and his major sociological studies at Atlanta University served the Federal Government as well as educators everywhere to solve the thorny questions of biracial cooperation. Most widely quoted was his demoli- tion of the myth that the impoverished South had heroically sacrificed itself since the Civil War to pay for Negro education as its forthright reparation for centuries of slavery. At the Sixth Annual Negro Conference in Atlanta, he and other scholars presented a balance sheet to prove that the Negro had actually paid for his schooling since Emancipation regardless of extreme poverty and lack of opportunity. Not only had he borne the full share of poll taxes and direct state property taxes which supported the schools, but logi- cally he should be credited with a proportionate share of the chief indirect taxes that supplemented school revenues-




liquor taxes, state rentals, convict labor income, license taxes and other monies belonging to both races. On this basis the Negro not only paid for his schools but for some of the white ones as well. Instead of allocating Negro funds to his education, most Southern states seemed to prefer discrimina- tory policies that produced pauperism, inefficiency, and crime. There was but one practical remedy, said Du Bois-federal aid to education.'0

These conclusions of the Atlanta Conference had already been anticipated in 1892 by the foremost Southern white champion of the Negro, George Washington Cable. He published in The Forum, a lengthy analysis, using somewhat different evidences than the Du Bois group, entitled, "Does the Negro Pay for his Education?" He rejected the conven- tional argument that the backwardness of the South in education was due to the large ratio of children to adults, the scarcity of taxable property, the sparsity of rural population, and the burden of state debts. To make his argument, he did not confine himself to the superior record of rural coun- ties in the Middlewest and Far West, but showed that some of the most impoverished states of the South like Mississippi and South Carolina spent more per capita for education than many of the more solvent states of the old Confederacy. Southerners for certain reasons depended too little on property taxes and too much on poll taxes. "But the whole system of school revenues and outlays is so ordered that in the non- collection of the poll taxes the poorest poor, white and black, are the principal sufferers-by hundreds of thousands." Tak- ing Georgia as an example where the Negro paid dispropor- tionately for his education, he concluded:

The least that can be said is that in the year 1889-90, the colored schools of Georgia did not really cost the white people of the State, as a whole, a single cent, either in poll tax, tax on property, or any other form of public revenue. In the other ten Southernmost States the case is not seriously different.

10 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 55-56; id., "The Burden of Negro Schooling," The Independent, 53 (1901), 1667-1668; id., "Of the Training of Black Men," Atlantic Monthly, 90 (1902), 289-297. Certain of his significant studies are summarized in "The College Bred Negro," Report of the Commissioner of Education, (1901-2), 191-229.




Since in many states, as in South Carolina, the urge to disfranchise the Negro led to non-collection of poll taxes, the race was penalized for education as well as voting.1l

While the Progressive movement in the North escaped the racial contradictions of the Dixie demagogues, there were leaders like Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana who justified imperialism in racial terms and too few concerned themselves with the deterioration of the Negro's status. It is true that Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington-a wealthy woman who chose to live in a Negro slum in order to understand the race problem-joined with a host of progressives to call a national convention on Negro strategy in 1910, including such celebrities as John Dewey, Oswald Garrison Villard, Clarence Darrow, and Franz Boas as well as Negro leaders from Du Bois down. The Conference, widely pub- licized in the press, noted particularly the cogent demonstra- tion of Du Bois that Negroes received a small share of Southern school funds and hence had to beg for money from Northern philanthropists. Disfranchisement made it impossi- ble for Negroes to assert their rights under the circumstances. More tangibly, the Conference did adopt detailed plans for a permanent organization, the National Association for the Ad- vancement of Colored People, with headquarters in New York City and, fittingly enough, they chose Du Bois as head of a special committee of publicity and research as well as editor.13

The NAACP itself was inspired in part by the current news of shocking racial abuses. Some of the so-called muck- rakers, notably Ray Stannard Baker, published racial ex- poses in The American Magazine, Outlook, The Independent, the Cosmopolitan, and McClure's. Oswald Garrison Villard,

11 George W. Cable, "Does the Negro Pay for His Education?" The Forum, 13 (1892), 640-649; see also W. S. Scarborough, "Negro Common Schools," Out- look, 71 (1902), 675-677.

12 Jane Addams, "The Progressive Party and the Negro," The Crisis, 5-6 (1912-13), 30-31; Mary W. Ovington, "Closing the Little Black Schoolhouse," The Survey, 24 (1910), 343-345. The contemporary educational crusade is care- fully summarized in Timothy L. Smith, "Progressivism in American Education, 1880-1900," Harvard Educational zReview, 31 (1961), 168-193.

13 0. G. Villard, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 191-192. For muckraking and the Negro see Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (Harcourt, 1939), 255-263.




grandson of the famous abolitionist and editor of the influential New York Evening Post, drafted the famous call for the Lincoln's Birthday Conference. Baker, who had reported such great conflicts as the Atlanta Riot of 1906, published these articles in an important book, Following the Color Line. Old Carl Schurz, the liberal German forty-eighter, was still alive to condemn persecution in his article, "Can the South Solve its Negro Problem," which appeared in January, 1904. Du Bois, of course, kept the issue hot in his magazine The Crisis, for which Jane Addams and other liberals con- tributed articles.

One event that shocked the nation in 1908 was the Su- preme Court decision upholding Kentucky's new law forbidding mixed schools. This referred particularly to Berea Col- lege, originally a white institution in antebellum times, but since opened to both races and supported as a mixed school by its donors. Justice Harlan, himself a Kentuckian, dissented vigorously:

Have we become so innoculated with prejudice of race that an American government, professedly based on the principle of freedom and charged with the protection of all citizens alike can make distinctions between such citizens in the matter of their association for innocent purposes14 simply because of their respective races.

However, the court was to shift in a liberal direction and in 1915, for example, nullified the notorious Grandfather clause used to disfranchise Negroes.

Even more shocking at the time was the news of the Springfield, Illinois, race riot of 1908. Here in the city of Abraham Lincoln and the state of the martyred abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy, thousands of miners and farmers, mostly of Southern origin, it appears, lynched a Negro suspected of rape, drove law-abiding Negroes from their homes, and ter- rorized the colored community in three days of rioting. Behind it was job competition and the influence of the new Jim Crowism across the Southern border. While Vardaman gloated over the Northern riot, Northern newspapers gener- ally and emphatically demanded punishment for the lynch- ers. Probably this incident more than any other set off the

14 Editorial, "The Berea College Decision," The Nation, 87 (1908), 480-481.




spark of indignation that aroused the movement for the NAACP.15 Further deterioration in race relations was evi- dent from time to time. In 1913, Florida tried to eliminate mission schools for Negroes by forbidding white teachers to instruct Negro pupils on pain of a heavy fine or six months' imprisonment.16

Nevertheless, the same awakening of conscience which produced the NAACP and the Urban League also inspired huge new philanthropies for the Negro such as the Rosen- wald Fund for thousands of rural Negro schools. Besides, the advance of well-being in the South benefited many Negroes as well, at least indirectly; and individual Negroes moving northward had success stories to tell about new educational advances, suffrage opportunities, and thriving small capitalist ventures. The federal government continued to show con- cern over Negro schools. In 1911, the Commissioner of Edu- cation sent questionnaires concerning these schools to South- ern State school superintendents and other educators. Half of these asked did not reply and others professed total ignor- ance of Negro education. However, one frank superintendent replied at length:

There has never been any serious attempt in this State to offer adequate educational facilities for the colored race. The average length of the term for the State is only four months; practically all of the schools are taught in dilapidated churches, which, of course, are not equipped with suitable desks, black- boards, and the other essentials of a school; practically all of the teachers are incompetent, possessing little or no education and having had no professional training whatever, except a few weeks obtained in the summer schools; the schools are gener- ally overcrowded, some of them having as many as 100 students to the teacher; no attempt is made to do more than teach the children to read, write, and figure, and these subjects are learned very imperfectly.

He concluded pessimistically, "It can probably be truthfully said that the negro schools are gradually improving, but they are still just about as poor and inadequate as they can be."

15 W. E. Walling, "The Race War in the North," The Independent, 65 (1908), 529-534.

16 Editorial, "A Shameful Law," The Independent, 76 (1913), 192. Georgia's efforts to cut state funds for Negro schools in proportion to tax collections from each race is reported in "Further Discriminations Against Negro Schools," Out- look 66 (1900), 912-914.




A South Carolina supervisor, equally blunt, confirmed this picture of shabby schools, backward pupils, and crowded classrooms. "Among the negro rural schools which I have visited, I have found only one in which the highest class knew the multiplication table," he wrote. Textbooks were wholly irrelevant to the lives of Negroes. Others pointed out that whites ran the Negro schools and granted teaching certificates on the principle that even a poor teacher was better than none. All conceded that Negro enrollments were steadily increasing and some thought that the teachers were getting better.17

The Commissioner's reports contained certain optimistic observations, noting the willingness of even poor Negro com. munities to lift themselves by their bootstraps and to collect large sums for their schools. Colored State Teachers Associa- tions sprang up in every Southern state to improve standards and were nationally organized in 1904. Funds to finance ex- pert supervisors for Negro schools came from powerful church boards such as the American Missionary Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the African Methodist Episcopalion organization. All observers agreed that the Jeanes Fund had greatly raised elementary school standards by their thorough system of supervision. Their example had inspired many Southern white communities to bolster the program of improved teaching methods and skills through supervision. The Rockefeller-financed General Edu- cation Board cooperated with State Boards of Education in employing experienced supervisors in Alabama, North Caro- lina, and Georgia, eventually aiding other Negro areas as well. Tennessee even chose a special supervisor for all Negro schools.19 Andrew Carnegie stimulated the movement for self-help among Negroes in the towns and cities by building

17 T. J. Jones in Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1912, I, 243-256. Compare with white schools in "Education in the South," United States Bureau of Education Bulletin #30, 1913, 17.

18 T. J. Jones in Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1914, I, 417-424; W. E. Aery, "The Trend in Negro Education," United States Bureau of Education Bulletin #30, 1913, 75-76.

19 J. H. Dillard, "National Aid to Negro Education," School and Society, 7 (1918), 669-671; id., "The Jeanes Fund," The Independent, 67-2-(1909), 1250- 1252; M. W. Ovington, "The Jeanes Fund," The Survey, 23 (1909), 590.




modern libraries for the race-necessarily segregated by local custom. By 1914, the large Negro community in Washington, D.C. could report a new colored Normal School costing $250,000 and many more Southern cities were voting funds for modern Negro school buildings. The Negroes also shared in the current movement for consolidating rural schools within the dual school system and secured better teachers, modern equipment, and properly graded classrooms.

Despite this progress, it was possible for Carter Wood- son, distinguished historian, teacher, and principal to assert as late as 1933 that some of the basic abuses mentioned long before by Kelly Miller continued to exist. In his challenging book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, he saw failures in both industrial and literary schools. Few graduates stayed very long in the trade for which they were trained (usually in obsolete shops) and educated Negroes experienced the frustration of those who lacked the opportunity to utilize their knowledge of literature, philosophy, and the social studies. The downward postbellum trend in skilled jobs had continued, he thought, and too few of his race were properly educated to earn a living. Outsiders still controlled Negro education without comprehending Negro needs; and the average member of the race lacked the knowledge of his traditions such as the contributions of Africa which would give him a sense of collective pride. The Talented Tenth were increasingly in evidence, but they were estranged from Negro mass institutions such as the churches.

Woodson himself inspired a biracial movement for research lecturing in Negro history, beginning with the founding in 1915 of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and its Journal of Negro History, which maintained high scholarly standards while encouraging students at all levels to study the history of the race.20 A generation of Negro historians such as the brilliant Du Bois, the prolific Charles H. Wesley, Woodson himself, and others served the race by combatting at the source racist historical interpreta- tions such as those of Professor Ulrich B. Phillips and his

20 C .G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Associated Publishers, 1933), 13.



200 JOURIAL OF NEGRO HISTORY

disciples. They made possible better textbooks and readings about American Negroes, African history, and race problems that were ignored in white textbooks. At the same time, the rapid diffusion of Negroes into areas of better opportunity in the North and the West promised better schools, diversified employment, and new hopes for the future.

HARVEY WISH Western Reserve University



negro education and the progressive movement

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