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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 41. The Negro School - 3. The Development of Negro Education in the South
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Chapter 41. The Negro School
“industrial.”^® If the white Southerners had to permit the Negroes to
get any education at all, they wanted it to be of the sort which would make
the Negro a better servant and laborer, not that which would teach him to
rise out of his “place.” The New England school teachers—who did most
of the teaching at first—wanted to train the Negroes as they themselves had
been trained in the North: the “three R^s” at the elementary level, with
such subjects as Latin, Greek, geometry, rhetoric coming in at the secondary
and college levels. But General S. C. Armstrong, a Union officer during the
Civil War,^^ had established Hampton Institute in the tidewater region of
Virginia as an “agricultural institution.” He wanted to see continued the
skilled artisan tradition that had existed among Negroes before the War.
His most famous pupil, Booker T. Washington, founded the Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama and became the apostle of industrial education for
Negroes. There is no doubt that—quite apart from the pedagogical merits
of this type of education—his message was extremely timely in the actual
power situation of the Restoration. It reconciled many Southern white men
to the idea of Negro education, and Washington has probably no small
share in the salvaging of Negro education from the great danger of its
being entirely destroyed. Meanwhile, the New England advocates of a
classical education and their Negro followers carried on at Atlanta, Fisk,
and at a few other Southern centers of Negro college education. The
elementary schools—there were practically no secondary schools for
Negroes in the South at this time—followed the patterns set by the
dominant colleges.
The struggle between the conservative and the radical group of Negro
leaders became focused on the issue: “industrial” versus “classical” educa-
tion for Negroes. Washington became the champion for the former posi-
tion, and he was backed by the white South and the bulk of Northern
philanthropy. Du Bois headed the group of Negro intellectuals who feared
that most often the intention, and in any case the result, would be to keep
Negroes out of the higher and more general culture of America.® This
dispute was important in the development of Negro ideologies. It scarcely
meant much for the actual development of Negro education in the South,
• In this particular issue there was more heat and rivalry between the two groups than
actual differences of opinion. Du Bois never deprecated in a wholesale manner vocational
education; in later days he became, in fact, more and more positively in favor of it.
Washington, on his side, had never accepted the dominant white man^s idea that education
for the Negro ought only to be training him to be a field hand or domestic servant and
to know his lowly “place.” In his famous Atlanta speech of 1895 he said:
“To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or
who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern
white man, ... I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are,—cast it down in
making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.
“ ‘Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics^ in commerce^ in domestic service, and in thi
frofession^^* (Up From Slavery [19011 first edition, 1900], p. 219. Italics ours.)
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