The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935

James D. Anderson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807898888
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.

1
Ex-Slaves and the Rise of Universal Education in the South, 1860–1880

Former slaves were the first among native southerners to depart from the planters’ ideology of education and society and to campaign for universal, state-supported public education. In their movement for universal schooling the ex-slaves welcomed and actively pursued the aid of Republican politicians, the Freedmen’s Bureau, northern missionary societies, and the Union army. This uprising among former slaves was the central threat to planter rule and planters’ conceptions of the proper roles of state, church, and family in matters of education. The South’s landed upper class tolerated the idea of pauper education as a charity to some poor white children, but state-enforced public education was another matter. The planters believed that state government had no right to intervene in the education of children and, by extension, the larger social arrangement. Active intervention in the social hierarchy through public education violated the natural evolution of society, threatened familial authority over children, upset the reciprocal relations and duties of owners to laborers, and usurped the functions of the church. During the period 1860 to 1880, other classes of native white southerners, including small farmers, industrialists, and laborers, showed little inclination to challenge the planters on these questions. Indeed, specific economic, political, social, and psychological relationships bound southern whites in general to the ideological position of the planter regime. The result was a postwar South that was extremely hostile to the idea of universal public education. The ex-slaves broke sharply with this position. With the aid of Republican politicians, they seized significant influence in state governments and laid the first foundation for universal public education in the South. This chapter tells the story of the ex-slaves’ struggle for universal schooling, why they pursued it, how they organized to defend their common interests, how they coped with the resistance of opposing social classes, and finally, how they gained the cooperation of sympathetic social groups.

Blacks emerged from slavery with a strong belief in the desirability of learning to read and write. This belief was expressed in the pride with which they talked of other ex-slaves who learned to read or write in slavery and in the esteem in which they held literate blacks. It was expressed in the intensity and the frequency of their anger at slavery for keeping them illiterate. “There is one sin that slavery committed against me,” professed one ex-slave, “which I will never forgive. It robbed me of my education.” The former slaves’ fundamental belief in the value of literate culture was expressed most clearly in their efforts to secure schooling for themselves and their children. Virtually every account by historians or contemporary observers stresses the ex-slaves’ demand for universal schooling. In 1879 Harriet Beecher Stowe said of the freed-men’s campaign for education: “They rushed not to the grog-shop but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling-book as bread, and pleaded for teachers as a necessity of life.” Journalist Charles Nordhoff reported that New Orleans’s ex-slaves were “almost universally … anxious to send their children to school.” Booker T. Washington, a part of this movement himself, described most vividly his people’s struggle for education: “Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.” When supervising the first contrabands at Fortress Monroe in 1861, Edward L. Pierce “observed among them a widespread desire to learn to read.”¹

The foundation of the freedmen’s educational movement was their self-reliance and deep-seated desire to control and sustain schools for themselves and their children. William Channing Gannett, a white American Missionary Association teacher from New England, reported that “they have a natural praiseworthy pride in keeping their educational institutions in their own hands. There is jealousy of the superintendence of the white man in this matter. What they desire is assistance without control.” The values of self-help and self-determination underlay the ex-slaves’ educational movement. To be sure, they accepted support from northern missionary societies, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and some southern whites, but their own action—class self-activity informed by an ethic of mutuality—was the primary force that brought schools to the children of freed men and women. This underlying force represented the culmination of a process of social class formation and development that started decades before the Civil War. “Emancipation,” as Herbert Gutman showed, “transformed an established and developed subordinate class, allowing ex-slave men and women to act on a variety of class beliefs that had developed but been constrained during several generations of enslavement.” Hence the South’s postbellum movement for universal education is best understood as an expression of the ex-slaves’ beliefs and behavior. External assistance notwithstanding, the postwar campaign for free schooling was rooted firmly in the beliefs and behavior of former slaves. W. E. B. DuBois was on the mark when he said: “Public education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea.” Such a view of postbellum southern education acknowledges the important contributions of northerners but recognizes the ex-slaves as the principal challenge to the region’s long-standing resistance to free schooling.²

Most northern missionaries went south with the preconceived idea that the slave regime was so brutal and dehumanizing that blacks were little more than uncivilized victims who needed to be taught the values and rules of civil society. They were bent on treating the freedmen almost wholly as objects. Many missionaries were astonished, and later chagrined, however, to discover that many ex-slaves had established their own educational collectives and associations, staffed schools entirely with black teachers, and were unwilling to allow their educational movement to be controlled by the “civilized” Yankees. In vital respects, missionary propaganda continued in spite of the social reality that contradicted it, but some of the more insightful Yankees began to appreciate ex-slaves as creative participants in the postbellum social process. John W. Alvord, the national superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau, was one of those perceptive Yankees. His growing awareness of a distinctly black perspective on educational and social matters was probably a result of his work, which compelled him to travel across the South and thereby afforded him a view of the depth and breadth of ex-slaves’ values and behavior.

In September 1865, Alvord was appointed inspector of schools for the bureau. The title was later changed to general superintendent of schools. In July 1865 Alvord appointed a superintendent of schools for each southern state to help compile records on the bureau’s educational activities. Alvord had traveled through nearly all the Confederate states by December 1865 and filed his first general report on the Freedmen’s Bureau schools in January 1866. In this document he gave special attention to the practice of “self-teaching” and “native schools” among the freed men and women. “Throughout the entire South,” Alvord reported, “an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves.” “In the absence of other teaching they are determined to be self-taught; and everywhere some elementary text-book, or the fragment of one, may be seen in the hands of negroes.” Not only were individuals found teaching themselves to read and write, but Alvord also discovered a system of what he chose to call “native schools,” one of which he found at Goldsboro, North Carolina: “Two colored young men, who but a little time before commenced to learn themselves, had gathered 150 pupils, all quite orderly and hard at study.” Further, Alvord discovered that “no white man, before me, had ever come near them.” Hence native schools were common schools founded and maintained exclusively by ex-slaves. Two of Alvord’s findings must be heavily emphasized. First, he found “native schools,” in his own words, “throughout the entire South.” Second, he discovered many of them in places that had not been visited by the Freedmen’s Bureau or northern benevolent societies. Alvord, realizing that his findings did not square with existing perceptions of “the character of the Negro,” took “special pains” to ascertain the facts on native schools. Such schools were found in “all the large places I visited,” and they were “making their appearance through the interior of the entire South.” After receiving much testimony from his field agents, “both oral and written,” Alvord estimated in 1866 that there were “at least 500 schools of this description … already in operation throughout the South.” This estimate, he warned his readers, was not an “overstatement.” Alvord had little doubt about the significance of his findings: “This educational movement among the freedmen has in it a self-sustaining element.” This “self-sustaining” activity was rooted firmly in the slave experience and began to surface before the war’s end.³

Before northern benevolent societies entered the South in 1862, before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and before Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) in 1865, slaves and free persons of color had already begun to make plans for the systematic instruction of their illiterates. Early black schools were established and supported largely through the Afro-Americans’ own efforts. The first of these schools, according to current historiography, opened at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in September 1861, under the leadership of Mary Peake, a black teacher. Primary historical sources, however, demonstrate that slaves and free persons of color started schools even before the Fortress Monroe venture. In July 1864, for instance, the black New Orleans Union commemorated the founding of the Pioneer School of Freedom, established in New Orleans in 1860, “in the midst of danger and darkness.” Some schools predated the Civil War period and simply increased their activities after the war started. A black school in Savannah, Georgia, had existed unknown to the slave regime from 1833 to 1865. Its teacher, a black woman by the name of Deveaux, quickly expanded her literacy campaign during and following the war. It was this type of “self-sustaining” behavior that produced the native schools Alvord observed throughout the South in 1866.⁴

Herbert Gutman’s pioneering work on this subject demonstrates further that the native schools of Fortress Monroe, Savannah, and New Orleans were not isolated occurrences. Such schools were also begun among refugees in Alexandria, Virginia. A white teacher did not work with Afro-Americans in Alexandria until October 1862, by which time they had already established several schools. “In April 1863,” wrote Gutman, “about four hundred children attended such schools.” Likewise, he documented schools for rural ex-slaves in northeastern South Carolina. In 1867 Camden blacks, largely through their own individual and collective efforts, established twenty-two schools in which more than four thousand children were instructed. Schooling also made significant progress among blacks in Sumter, Marion, Darlington, Simmonsville, Florence, Kingstree, Chetau, Bennettsville, and Timonville, South Carolina. Ex-slaves contributed their money and labor to help make these schools possible, and they organized responsible committees to supervise the schools.⁵

Zion School in Charleston, South Carolina, established in December 1865, had an entirely black administration and teaching staff. By December 1866 it had 13 teachers, an enrollment of 850 students, and an average daily attendance of 720 pupils. Wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly, 15 December 1866.

What happened in Alexandria, Virginia, before 1865 and in northeastern South Carolina in 1866 and 1867 occurred elsewhere in the South. Afro-Americans over the entire region contributed significantly to the origin and development of universal schooling. Even where the Union army and Freedmen’s Bureau were heavily involved in the education of refugees and ex-slaves, the long-term success of schooling depended mainly on Afro-Americans. The activities of Louisiana refugees and ex-slaves illustrate the importance of such involvement. Blacks began establishing small private schools between 1860 and 1862. Though these first schools were inadequately financed and haphazardly run, attempts were made to organize them on a systematic basis. After Union forces occupied New Orleans in 1863, however, the federal Commission of Enrollment presided over blacks’ educational activities. According to historian John W. Blassingame, Major General Nathaniel P. Banks “instituted the most thorough of all systems for educating the freedmen in his Department of Gulf (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas).” In October 1863, Banks authorized the Commission of Enrollment to take a census of Afro-Americans in the Gulf states and to establish schools for blacks in New Orleans. On 22 March 1864, he established a Board of Education to organize and govern the spread of black schools. In September 1864, the black New Orleans Tribune reported that Banks’s effort had already resulted in 60 schools with “eight thousand scholars and more than one hundred teachers.” By December 1864, the Board of Education was operating 95 schools with 9,571 children and 2,000 adults, instructed by 162 teachers. This system of schooling extended beyond the New Orleans area. The Tribune reported, in July 1864, that teachers were “sent to instruct black pupils in rural areas.” In 1865 the Freedmen’s Bureau took control of this school system, which then included 126 schools, 19,000 pupils, and 100 teachers.⁶

Such historical evidence has been wrongly used to attribute the freed-men’s school movement to Yankee benevolence or federal largesse. The events that followed the Freedmen’s Bureau takeover, however, underscore Gutman’s observation that the ex-slaves’ educational movement was rooted deeply within their own communal values. The Board of Education and later the Freedmen’s Bureau maintained these schools through federal contributions and by levying a property tax. In 1866, allegedly to reduce the financial costs to the bureau, its officials temporarily closed all black schools under their authorization, and the general tax for freedmen’s education was suspended by military order. The effect of this change was catastrophic. Alvord recorded the actions of Louisiana’s ex-slaves: “The consternation of the colored population was intense. … They could not consent to have their children sent away from study, and at once expressed willingness to be assessed for the whole expense.” Black leaders petitioned Yankee military officers to levy an added tax upon their community to replenish the bureau’s school fund. Petitions demanding the continuation of universal schooling poured in from all over Louisiana. As Alvord recounted: “I saw one [petition], from plantations across the river, at least 30 feet in length, representing 10,000 negroes. It was affecting to examine it and note the names and marks (x) of such a long list of parents, ignorant themselves, but begging that their children might be educated, promising that from beneath their present burdens, and out of their extreme poverty, they would pay for it.” Such actions reveal the collective effort and shared values of the ex-slaves who built and sustained schools across the postwar South.⁷

Much more than federal largesse made free schooling a reality among Louisiana’s ex-slaves. After the bureau withdrew its support, the freed-men took control of the educational system and transformed federal schools into local free schools. The New Orleans Tribune reported that as soon as the bureau’s failures were recognized, educational associations “were organized in various parts of the state, at least in its principal cities, to promote the cause of education, and with the particular view of helping the children of parents in reduced circumstances to attend schools.” One such association, the Louisiana Educational Relief Association, was organized in June 1866. Its primary aim was to “disseminate the principle of education, by assisting poor children whose friends are unable to do so.” The board of trustees could “lease or buy such school property as may be deemed judicious, and examine and employ teachers.” Louisiana’s freedmen believed themselves primarily responsible for providing education for their children. “Each race of men, each class in society, have [sic] to shape their own destinies themselves,” wrote J. Willis Menard, secretary of the Louisiana Educational Relief Association. Although acknowledging the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern benevolent societies, Menard maintained that the ex-slaves’ survival and development rested largely on their own shoulders: “The colored people are called today to mark out on the map of life with their own hands their future course or locality in the great national body politic. Other hands cannot mark for them; other tongues cannot speak for them; other eyes cannot see for them; they must see and speak for themselves, and make their own characters on the map, however crooked or illegible.” That Menard’s feelings were not unusual is revealed through the behavior of Louisiana’s freedmen from 1866 to 1868. During this period they developed a parallel system of free schools. Even when the bureau reopened its schools, private schools for black pupils continued to spring up outside its control. Enrollment in such schools grew rapidly and actually exceeded the number registered in the bureau’s system. In January 1867 there were sixty-five private schools in New Orleans enrolling 2,967 pupils; the bureau maintained fifty-six schools with 2,527 pupils enrolled. Free schooling was sustained in Louisiana largely as a result of the ex-slaves’ collective efforts.⁸

The relationship between black self-activity and educational changes in the postwar South is further illustrated by the behavior of Georgia’s ex-slaves. In December 1864 a committee of Afro-American leaders in Savannah met with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General William T. Sherman to request support for the education of Georgia’s liberated blacks. Out of this conference evolved a plan for establishing an organized system of free schools. In 1865 Afro-American leaders formed the Georgia Educational Association to supervise schools in districts throughout the state, to establish school policies, and to raise funds to help finance the cost of education. Freedmen’s Bureau officials described the aims and structure of this association:

To associate the efforts of the people, the prominent educators in the State, the agents of northern societies, and such of...