Throughout the postbellum era, upper class whites maintained a fiction of a society in which each racial group and social class would have its proper place and role. The conception of society as an organism apparently had deep roots in the period between Nat Turner's rebellion and the outbreak of the Civil War. When the plantation elite and non-slave holding whites armed themselves to the hilt, outlawed black literacy, and mounted nightly slave patrols along plantation boundaries to stave off any potential threat of rebellion. The notion of place was fixed firmly in the minds of white elites, who envisioned a caste-like society. In their peculiar mental world, the planter elite were the head, that is, the brain. Blacks were the hands and feet, necessary, but of a lesser order than the head. Where whites of the lower orders, whom elites snubbed as crackers and rednecks fit in the social hierarchy is unclear. In any event, poor whites tended to mimic sometimes crudely elite behavior. For example, dueling with rifles instead of pistols. >> Southern industrialists and their northern allies looked to Booker T Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for inspiration. The story of industrial education for blacks begins not with Washington, but with a former Union general, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1868. The Hampton Institute's primary purpose was training black teachers for the rural South's segregated schools. Although, some of its graduates would teach in cities. A secondary school, Hampton offered a program for students who had at least some elementary education. Manual training, later called industrial education, stood side-by-side with traditional school subjects in the institute's curriculum. In Hampton's fields, workshops and industrial enterprises, future teachers learned productive work habits and trade skills. Men learned brick laying, for example, a source of supplementary income in a rural district. Women learned, for example, dress making, and trade skills learned at Hampton could be taught to young people in rural schools. In Hampton's classrooms future teachers learned Christian morality and the 3 R's. Also history, geography, and elementary science. Classical studies were skewed, which would distinguish Hampton and its descendent Tuskegee from the rising black university, such as Fisk in Atlanta. What what the governing aim of the Hampton idea? Chapman believed that blacks, while inherently intelligence, were, as a race, morally laggard by hundreds of years when measured against whites. The means for blacks' moral development, he asserted, would be to prove themselves as productive workers on White South's terms. Moral uplift would come only with the achievement of hard earned economic productivity. >> Samuel Chapman Armstrong's prized pupil was Booker T. Washington, a former slave who rose to become the national spokesperson for industrial education. Washington was Armstrong's handpicked emissary for spreading the Hampton doctrine. From 1881 to 1915, Washington headed the famed Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Like Hampton, Tuskegee was co-educational and Tuskegee trained future teachers. Unlike Hampton, however, Tuskegee had a black principal, Washington. And a black faculty. Adam Faircloth notes the significance of black agency in the operation of Tuskegee, quote, given the antipathy of white Southerners to white Northern teachers, Tuskegee's all black faculty provided a degree of political protection. It was also a racial manifesto. Tuskegee told the world by demonstration rather than rhetoric that blacks had the capacity to teach themselves, manage complex institutions, and elevate themselves through their own efforts. It proclaimed that blacks could furnish their own leaders. Washington designated his students as his personal agents for the improvement of rural life in the South. He exhorted them to create primary schools where none existed before, teach the three r's, history, science, and vocational skills, exemplify moral uplift. And show black sharecroppers how to deal with exploitative landlords and merchants. Emphatically absent from the Tuskegee curriculum were classical studies and modern foreign languages. >> Hm. Located in Alabama's black belt, Tuskegee operated in a racial climate that was hostile, formidably so. Any form of black education that might jeopardize the white image of organic society. A black institution associated with industrial education shorn of any association with the so-called higher studies was grudgingly palatable to deep south white supremacists, and broadly appealing to northern white philanthropists. Suffice it to say, Booker T. Washington acted pragmatically in an extraordinarily difficult situation. He had to hold hostile deep south whites at bay and grow Tuskegee at the same time. For capital and operating funds, Washington turned to northern white philanthropists, so called captains of industry. Accordingly, Tuskegee shifted, at least rhetorically, for fundraising purposes. Its curricular emphasis from training teachers to qualifying workers for particular trades. It actually did both. Money poured into Tuskegee, which expanded its campus to more than 1,800 acres by the mid 1890s. As the racial climate heated up across the South in the 1890's, and blacks increasingly became the victims of lynching and other forms of murder. As well as arson, beatings, mutilations at the hands of white mobs. Washington devised a rhetorical strategy to mollify white supremacists while advancing Tuskegee's educational goals. At the 1895 Cotton State's Exposition in Atlanta, Washington assured his white audience that the wisest blacks understood that integration in the South's social institutions was a pipe dream. Civil equality was attainable, but only after what he called quote, severe and constant struggle. Meaning that only by rising to the status of economic equality with whites would blacks be able to achieve civic equality. >> As for racial integration, Washington removed it from the table. Raising his right hand he declaimed famously quote. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers yet one as the hand and all things essential to mutual progress. The means for racial harmony was an economic strategy that would pose no threat to White's notion of the organic society. With his speech at the Cotton States Exposition, Washington, a dynamic speaker, became the leader of blacks in America. In our next episode, we look further at the education of blacks in the South, in the context of the Jim Crow system of intense racial segregation. A system that was firmly entrenched in the South in the 1890s. [MUSIC]
