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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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890 An American Dilemma
which was dominated by the whites. If Negro education in the South did
not become turned entirely into industrial education on the elementary
level, the main explanation was, as we shall see, the growing expense of
such training after the Industrial Revolution and the competitive interest
of white workers to keep the Negroes out of the crafts and industry. On
the higher level, a nonvocational Negro education had, as Du Bois always
emphasized, its chief strength in the fact that Tuskegee Institute and other
similar schools raised a demand for teachers with a broader educational
background.
During all this time, from the Civil War until today, there has been a
steady stream of money going from Northern philanthropy to Southern
education. A large part of it has gone to white education. But a considerable
portion has gone to Negro education, and it has had strategic importance:
first, to give it a start during Reconstruction, later to hinder its complete
destruction during Restoration, and to advance it in recent decades.
From about 1865 to about 1875, the period of ^^classical” education, most
of the money came from Northern reform groups and churches, aided by
state funds allocated by the Reconstruction governments. From about 1880
to about 1905 these sources were pretty dry, and educators of Negroes
appealed to wealthy Northern businessmen, who had little interest in
Negroes but could be relied upon to donate to most nonradical charitable
causes. This was also the period when Negro college students formed sing-
ing groups which appeared before Northern audiences and took up
collections.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Negro education
received a great boost when the Northern philanthropic foundations stepped
into the picture on a much larger scale.^® Before then the George Peabody
Fund (established in 1867) gave money to both white and Negro common
schools and teacher-training schools in the South.“^ The John F. Slater Fund
(established in 1882) supported industrial and teacher-training schools.
Both Funds were small, and at first dominated by conservative principles.
In 1908 a Quaker lady of Philadelphia, Miss Anna T. Jeanes, established
a Fund to give impetus to the small rural Southern Negro school. Mr.
Jackson Davis, then school superintendent of Henrico County in Virginia
and now an officer on the General Education Board, and Miss Virginia
Randolph, a Negro teacher in that county, worked out the plan for this
Fund. This plan calls for a rural industrial supervisor who goes from school
to school in a county and helps the teachers organize their domestic science,
their gardening and their simple carpentry work. At first the Fund paid the
salaries of these ^^Jeanes’ teachers,” but gradually many of the county
school boards took over the function. The remnants of the Peabody, Slater,
and Jeanes Funds have been recently integrated into the Southern Educa-
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