W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2004 Postbellum Education of African Americans: Race, Economy, Power, and the Pursuit of a System of Schooling in the Rural Virginia Counties of Surry and Gloucester Benjamin andrew Swenson College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/etd Part of the African American Studies Commons, African History Commons, American Studies Commons, and the Other Education Commons Recommended Citation Swenson, Benjamin andrew, "Postbellum Education of African Americans: Race, Economy, Power, and the Pursuit of a System of Schooling in the Rural Virginia Counties of Surry and Gloucester" (2004). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects.21220/s2-g2je-kb12 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@wm.
POSTBELLUM EDUCATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS Race, Economy, Power, and the Pursuit of a System of Schooling in the Rural Virginia Counties of Surry and Gloucester A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of American Studies The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Benjamin Andrew Swenson 2004 APPROVAL SHEET THIS THESIS IS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS BENJAMIN ANDREW SWENSON, AUTHOR APPROVED, MAY 2004 / // y / — c? ^7 GREY GUNDAKER, ADVISOR RICHARD LO DARLENE O’DELL DEDICATION Dedicated to my mother, Mary Signe Swenson, whose ceaseless devotion and years of tender nurturing have made me who I am. Her kindness, humility, passion, and acumen serve as standards to which I humbly aspire. Words are inadequate to express my love for her. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract v Introduction: Thesis and Strategy 2 Chapter 1: A Brief History of African American Education 8 Chapter 2: Case Study - Northern Missionary Amelia Howard 19 Chapter 3: Social and Economic Interests in African American Education 27 Chapter 4: The Arts and Crafts Movement, Immigration, and Schooling in the United States 39 Chapter 5: Case Study - Samuel C.
Armstrong and Hampton Institute 46 Chapter 6: Opposition to the Hampton Model of Education 56 Chapter 7: Two Case Studies - Smallwood Memorial Institute and Gloucester Agricultural and Industrial School 63 John J. Smallwood and Smallwood Memorial Institute 64 William Price and Gloucester Agricultural and Industrial School 69 Conclusion 79 Endnotes 84 Works Cited 88 Books 88 Journals 89 Government and Historical Documents 91 Vita 93 IV ABSTRACT The purpose of the following study is to evaluate the system of schooling devised by educational reformers for African Americans in the late nineteenth century. As the United States entered a new social, political, and economic era after the Civil War, the enfranchisement of African Americans became an issue too large to ignore. Accordingly, numerous organizations and individuals undertook this formidable charge.
But the peculiar circumstances during which African American education evolved ensured that it was to be no easy task. African American schooling was inevitably toned by contemporary notions of race, economy, and hegemony. This work draws upon the research of educational scholars to shape an historical framework. Notable examples of African American schools and the debate surrounding them provide insight into the racial and political dynamics o f the educational system in the United States.
Within that context, several local case studies illustrate how African American education actually developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rhetoric and reality were not often aligned. I aim to show that the challenges faced by educators and their attendant successes and failures were contingent on much more than prevailing attitudes about race following the Civil War. The architects of the African American educational system who exerted the most control for the better part o f the late nineteenth century had financial and authoritative interests.
As a result, they broadly touted industrial education as the most prudent pedagogy. Further, I will argue that both a national dialogue and, perhaps most importantly, teachers and principles who often discreetly contravened the established educational model, undermined the system of industrial schooling. It was this resistance and daring that laid the groundwork for significant gains by the African American community, such as the Civil Rights Movement, in the latter half of the twentieth century. v POSTBELLUM EDUCATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS 2 INTRODUCTION: THESIS AND STRATEGY In 1904, W.
Du Bois penned a brief history of Atlanta University. He wrote: Many men and women of energy and devotion have built their lives into this work. Every stone on that broad campus has meant the pulse of some man’s life blood and the sacrifice of some woman’s heart.1 In a sense, this description is a metaphor for the painstaking efforts that were advanced toward educating millions of African Americans in the wake of the Civil War. Du Bois’s remembrance succinctly and appropriately characterizes an intricate movement that was as much a product of its historical context as it was a reflection of the labor of its participants.
African American education in the United States did not materialize out of thin air. There was much that went into its making. It resulted from new relationships, passionate debates, and, perhaps most importantly, hard work. The people who chose to accept the formidable charge of educating the freedmen hailed from all walks o f life.
Males and females, African Americans and whites, blue-collar workers and elites alike became part of this educational movement. There were philanthropists who saw economic opportunity in African Americans, missionaries who sacrificed their time - and in some cases their lives - and there were also former slaves themselves willing, yearning, and often testing their own limits, all in an effort to taste the sweet fruit of an education that had been denied their race for hundreds of years. There were reformers who were compelled by altruism, some who aimed for political expediency, and still others who sought to secure prosperity as the nation moved into a nebulous new era. But just as these people were products of circumstance, so too were they, and by extension their task, a reflection of the time in which their crusade materialized.
Even as plans to educate African Americans were still in their formative stages, the United States was a nation that embraced human bondage. Racism loitered in every part of the country. Decades of sectional crisis, violent civil war and failed reconstruction hardly purged the nation of bigotry and biased perceptions of race, gender, class, and social responsibility. Thus, every lesson taught to African American children in schoolhouses across the nation was a reflection of social developments and understandings much larger than anyone - student, teachers, and reformers - could have imagined.
Because African American education in the United States evolved amid peculiar circumstances, the experiments conducted by men and women to that end were themselves unique, if not somewhat erratic. There was not one definitive plan to educate the African American race. Voices that weighed in mightily from all sides left no conceivable stone unturned. When a weakness was perceived in one method, several alternatives were offered in its stead.
Even the obvious successes in African American education were challenged for their merit and usefulness and not a scheme that was devised slipped by unscathed from the hordes of scholars who proposed alternative pedagogies. Cordial arguments about African American education sometimes devolved in to personal attacks. Not a few reputations were tarnished by individuals who touted a specific agenda.2 But general trends in African American education did emerge. Specific ideologies and institutions became models from which much of the educational 4 system, particularly in the South, drew deep influence.
Hampton Institute, for one, spawned other educational ventures that mimicked its procedures almost exactly. The hegemony of specific models like Hampton was undermined and ultimately overturned by the contentious nature of African American education. Schooling in the South was destined to be heterogeneous; only a few schools toed any consistent line. This work explores the complex vicissitudes o f African American education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In that regard, three broad areas are examined. First, this paper surveys the specific historical events out of which the educational system in the United States grew. During each notable era, certain occurrences defined the scope of educational movements, the achievements reformers were able to accomplish, and precedents that would ultimately be used as a justification for supplanting outmoded plans with novel designs. These chronological stages allowed individuals and institutions to surface that would eventually play decisive roles in the societal character of African American schooling.
Further, this work analyzes African American education within its proper historical context, a construction that is critical to an unbiased study. The issue of race is not only contentious, but malleable as well; a twenty-first century interpretation of it is far removed from a nineteenth century one. Getting at the heart of what role race played in educational reform requires the deconstruction of its meaning. The definition of a racial perspective in this study is also accompanied by an historical educational investigation as well.
Much of the debate about African American schooling after the Civil War focused on the value of manual education, specifically, training in industry 5 and agriculture. Again, a modern interpretation is a disingenuous one. This paper defines race and education according to nineteenth and twentieth century interpretations. Finally, this work provides specific examples of historical developments through the use of case studies.
Two of the most notable African American schools, Hampton and Tuskegee, are given generous scrutiny since they generally serve as standards by which many other educational endeavors can be gauged. But the true exemplars o f African American education were local instances of missionary work and common and secondary schools. This study explores educational undertakings in two specific localities, the counties of Surry and Gloucester in Virginia. Three names in particular, Amelia Howard, John Smallwood, and William Price, now relegated to all but obscurity, were in reality founders of African American education in the South.
The churches and schools established by these individuals were real, if sometimes short-lived, and they embody the genuine dynamics of social engineering, historical development, and concealed resistance as reformers forged a scheme for educating former slaves and their descendants. The most important role that African American education played was on a local level. Indeed, all of the deliberation in the world would have amounted to nothing had local schools not functioned as the machinery of the educational system. Because of that fact, this exploration will draw upon educational scholarship to construct a general history of African American education and use local sources to illustrate that chronicle.
I will show how power, and specifically the maintenance of control, was an important concern in the creation of an educational system for African Americans. Dominant groups had an interest in perpetuating the caste system that 6 was destroyed in name only after the Civil War and many educational endeavors were modeled toward that end. Additionally, this work will demonstrate that race, although it was an enormous determinant of the African American educational system, was not the sole factor explaining why schools developed according to a prescribed agenda. One of the most notable proponents of education that accommodated the wishes o f the privileged elite, Booker T.
Washington (a man who attracted thousands of followers), was an African American. This study will examine several other factors that influenced the decision to steer African Americans toward a course that diverged from a classical education. Finally, I will examine why educators eventually abandoned industrial and agricultural education for African Americans. As the system evolved, African Americans argued both sides of the educational debate.