Schooling along the color line: Progressives and the education of blacks in the new south

Perhaps one of the most neglected features of the history of postbellum Black education is the role of White southern university leaders in proselytizing the northern-inspired and financed industrial education movement to their fellow southerners. This article examines the writings and speeches of several "progressive" southern academics who formed the linchpin of the industrial education crusade. It shows how, as advocates for school reform, these intellectuals lent the authority of their institutions and the weight of their ideas to promote and defend an educational system designed to maintain racial control and Black subservience in the post-Emancipation South.

State universities were at the forefront of social reform in the American South after the Civil War. Troubled by the region's chronic poverty, growing numbers of public university leaders shrugged off classical educational models of the antebellum era and adopted practical schooling as the vehicle for social uplift in the "new" South. A new generation of progressive administrators and faculty members promoted the addition of professional schools, social science departments, and university extension programs in the belief that a utilitarian education was the springboard to economic development.1 As intellectuals and technical experts, these educational leaders became the architects for an emerging education movement in the new South and the leading lights of southern progressivism (Dennis, 1996). However, it was in their assumed capacity as authorities on racial issues that they left their most indelible mark.

A group of southern White educators, not northern industrialists, emerged as the most influential propagandists for a system of instruction designed to maintain Black subservience. Paradoxically, while these educators assumed a leading role in promoting educational improvement for southern Whites, they simultaneously propagated a pedagogical philosophy that fit conveniently into a scheme supporting the continued racial submission of the freedmen and women. Southern higher education leaders such as Edwin Alderman (president of the University of Virginia), Samuel Chiles Mitchell (president of the University of South Carolina), Walter Barnard Hill (chancellor of the University of Georgia), and Charles Dabney (president of the University of Tennessee) formed the linchpin of this growing educational movement. As southerners and educational experts, they imparted an aura of intellectual legitimacy to the movement that its northern originators and proponents could not. Unlike their outsider counterparts, southern university leaders active in the educational wing of the progressive movement cast themselves as disinterested technocrats committed to promoting economic vitality and political tranquility in the South. Under this banner, they wrote articles, speeches, and treatises that promoted technical education for Blacks and liberal education for Whites. By positioning themselves as scientifically minded experts with unimpeachable southern credentials, they filled a crucial void in the northern program for industrial education.

From strategically important positions within the southern education movement, men such as Alderman, Mitchell, Hill, and Dabney provided leadership and direction for the industrial education crusade. Politely distancing themselves from the racial extremism that sent the rates of lynching and other hate crimes against Blacks skyrocketing in the 1890s, they espoused a program of race-based educational discrimination that was more palatable to White middle- and upper-class southerners. More than northern philanthropists or southern Black educators, they became the leading boosters of education for the region's newly emancipated Blacks.

Central to this analysis is the suggestion that improved educational standards and an increasing emphasis on regional development went hand in hand with Black educational proscription in the American South. Clearly, the history of the educational modernization of higher education in the region is inextricably tied to the crystallization of what Cell (1982) calls the "highest stage of White supremacy": the institution of racial separation in all aspects of society. The argument here is that the progressives' theories on Black educational development posed no threat to the southern orthodoxy. Indeed, their emphasis on gradualism with regard to Black advancement and educational separation fit comfortably into the New South vision of economic expansion and neopaternalistic White supremacy.

PROGRESSIVES AND THE NEW SOUTH'S NEW RACIAL ORDER

Progressive White southerners welcomed the stabilization of race relations after the 1890s. Along with most of their peers, they were convinced that segregation and Black proscription would guarantee social order, economic progress, and enduring White supremacy. With the race "question" having been resolved by the Civil War, the progressives believed that the South could turn its attention to other pressing social issues. Disfranchisement had removed the threat that political power might be wielded as an instrument of Black advancement (Daniel, 1986; Grantham, 1983).

Edwin Alderman, president of Tulane University in New Orleans from 1900 to 1904 and the University of Virginia from 1904 to 1931, and a leading figure in the progressive educational reform movement in North Carolina, echoed these sentiments in a 1908 article entitled "The Growing South." Removed from politics, Alderman claimed, Blacks would focus more constructively on the achievement of economic self-reliance. He also believed that Black disfranchisement would have an equally important effect on southern Whites, placing their exercise of the vote "on the highest plane possible in a republic" (Grantham, 1983, pp. 126).

Samuel Mitchell, a professor of history at Richmond College from 1905 until his election to the presidency of the University of South Carolina in 1908, heartily agreed. Mitchell was deeply involved in the crusade for progressive educational reform in Virginia. Throughout his career, he maintained close ties to both the Southern Education Board (SEF) and the General Education Board (GEB), the leading vehicles of educational reform in the region. Writing in 1908, Mitchell claimed that the constitutional limitations on Black suffrage since 1890 eliminated "the fear of negro domination" and "opened the way for increasing [White southerners'] independence in political thought and action" (p. 109).

If anything, Alderman, Mitchell, and other progressive southern educators portrayed Black disfranchisement as a major accomplishment of social engineering. Instead of adopting the barbarism of extralegal violence, they contended, intelligent southern opinion had settled on White political control and social separation. They trusted that in the future, the South's policy toward Blacks would be generated from "a scientific habit of investigation as to the facts of their progress, coupled with an intelligent interest in their development" (Mitchell, 1908, p. 109). The comparatively sanitary policies of disfranchisement and educational segregation appealed to the progressives, who were enamored with the idea of regional advancement through discrete adjustments to the social order. Armed with such "rational" techniques for maintaining White supremacy, progressives shielded themselves from the contradictions inherent in their program for Black uplift.

As Mitchell (n.d.) later asserted, racial conciliation was in perfect harmony with the spirit of service underlying the progressive ethos. Progressives, he maintained, rejected the image of Blacks as beasts of burden and replaced it with a paternalistic counter-image of Blacks as dependent children. For example, in discussing the alleged problem of Black intemperance, Mitchell suggested that "under the fairest conditions, this child-race, so clogged by appetite and passion, finds it difficult to get on well in the world" (unnumbered page). He postulated that Blacks had been morally and intellectually stunted by slavery and were thus capable of improvement only under the guidance of liberal-minded southerners.

Charles Dabney reinforced Mitchell's sentiments. From the inception of the southern progressive reform movement, Dabney, who led the agricultural experiment station at the University of North Carolina before accepting the presidency of the University of Tennessee in 1887, played a prominent part. In 1901, as the director of the SEB's propaganda division, Dabney implored southern reformers concerned about the education of Blacks to recognize the "momentous fact that the negro is a child race, at least two thousand years behind the Anglo-Saxon in its development" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 85). According to Dabney, Blacks were harmless children who required the supervision of their White superiors.

Given such views, it should come as no surprise that most progressive White southerners unquestioningly accepted the maintenance of racially segregated schools.2 Indeed Mitchell (1904) praised educational leaders in the state of Mississippi for their heroism in bearing the burden of a dual system of public education for Whites and Blacks. He described Mississippi's system as a model for the South, applauding it for providing the "capital, initiative [and] brains" to educate the masses separately (p. 166). Segregated education stemmed not only from a concern for White racial sensibilities, Mitchell claimed, but also from the belief that the preservation of social order and White supremacy demanded it. Mitchell feared, however, that the Magnolia State's admirable "self-reliance" also had its limits. In underscoring the federal government's responsibility for educating those it had emancipated at great cost to the region's Whites, he spared no rhetorical expense, proclaiming that the future of southern society was at stake:

If it was right to use the national arm to free the slave and to clothe him with citizenship, surely it is right to use the same hand to fit him for civil efficiency....Without this, freedom itself is a delusion to the negro and a menace to the White man. (Mitchell, 1904, p. 166)

Walter Barnard Hill (1903), chancellor of the University of Georgia from 1899 to 1906 and a strong proponent of university modernization, theorized that both Blacks and Whites agreed that segregated schooling was axiomatic in the South. By his observation, a considerable portion of "the intelligent negroes" accepted the wisdom of separate schooling on the premise that integrated education would threaten a "blending of the races. . between the higher types of their people and the lower types of the White race" (pp. 81). Such indiscriminate mixing, Hill warned, would prove deleterious to the best interests of Blacks. Based on these convictions, he argued that compulsory, universal, yet segregated education become the standard in the South. He failed to mention how the equitable distribution of educational revenues between Black and White schools would be guaranteed. Hill was confident, however, that in those situations in which White officials were less vigilant in the enforcement of compulsory education for African Americans, the determined efforts of southern Blacks to improve the quality of education for their own children would provide sufficient compensation.

University of Virginia President Alderman (1906) also accepted the a priori rationality of segregated education. In an article assessing the achievements of a generation of southern educational reformers, Alderman dogmatically concluded that public schooling for all children regardless of race, class, or religion was a settled issue, "provided that the children of the White and black races should be taught in separate schools" (p. 239). Two years later, Alderman (1908) reiterated this point, stressing the beneficent effects of "absolute social separateness" for racial advancement (p. 10378).

According to Anderson (1988), the issue of Black education was primarily one of political economy. Progressives and their philanthropic allies in the North believed that "the right schooling could train laborers to be better citizens and more efficient workers" (pp. 80). In their view, industrial education was "a sound investment in social stability and economic prosperity" (p. 81). While no less committed to Black subordination than their extremist adversaries, southern progressives considered industrial education and racial accommodation rather than overt repression more effective methods for accomplishing the same objective.

Industrial education was key to the progressives' platform of racial accommodationalism. They believed that the proper curriculum would equip Blacks with the rudimentary skills required by the emerging economic order. It would also inculcate them with the middle-class virtues required to ensure social stability. Thus educated, Blacks would quietly assume a subordinate though productive place in southern society. As the University of South Carolina's President Mitchell (1911) explained to the Reverend P. P. Watson of the Colored Normal College in Orangeburg, South Carolina-the home, the church, and the school were crucial for encouraging among Blacks the "habit of thrift, obedience to law, the love of home, kindliness toward one's neighbor, cleanliness of person" and a "hunger for practical righteousness" (unnumbered page). Discussing the ever-thorny "race problem" in an article for the Southern Workman, Mitchell (n.d.) argued that denying education to African Americans would perpetuate ignorance and militate against southern progress. Alternately, he maintained, the slow and steady influences of the more utilitarian industrial form of education and religion would make Blacks "more useful in industry and more moral in society" (p. 548).

THE HAMPTON-TUSKEGEE MODEL AND PROGRESSIVISM

Committed to maintaining a compliant, Black agricultural labor force, White progressive educational reformers in both the North and South applauded what became known as the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education. Indeed, many northern architects of the industrial education movement first came into contact with the South through their support for the Hampton Institute, a private, historically Black college located in Virginia's tidewater region. Founded in 1868 by northern philanthropist Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Hampton enshrined the theory of industrial education, which held that practical training in the skills required by southern agriculture and industry was best suited to the educational needs of African Americans (Anderson, 1988). Alternately, proponents of this model disparaged literature and philosophy as unnecessary for and unsuited to agricultural and industrial menials. Hampton's practical curriculum reflected Armstrong's conviction that a "particular combination of hard work, political socialization, and social discipline would mold the appropriate kind of conservative Black teachers" (Anderson, 1988, p. 63).

White northern philanthropists and southern educational reformers were not the only proponents of industrial education for Blacks. Booker T. Washington, an African American educated at Hampton, became one of the leading voices for the Hampton philosophy in the 1890s. In 1891, Washington became principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Reflecting the influence of his years at Hampton and his own experience as a former slave, Washington espoused the virtues of practical learning for Blacks mired in poverty and racial hostility. In his famous address to the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, Washington (1895/1990) included industrial education in the Black "compromise" with the White South. He further admonished Blacks to "cast down their buckets where [they were]" and accept political disfranchisement as well as social inequality in exchange for economic progress (p. 173).

Industrial education along the lines of the Hampton-Tuskegee model provided a point of ideological convergence for northern philanthropists and southern educators. White advocates of industrial training from both regions celebrated the model as a lever for Black economic and social progress. Industrial education based on this model, they argued, would prepare African Americans for survival in a competitive marketplace, stamp out Black indolence and immorality, and foster economic self-reliance. For southern progressive who embraced the New South creed, industrial education pandered to their racial paternalism and dreams of economic rehabilitation. Considering the social stability it promised, they also hoped that it would placate White southerners concerned about the prospect of renewed northern interference in southern affairs (Hill, 1904b; Meier, 1966). The majority of southern progressive educators viewed the Hampton-Tuskegee model as the only acceptable paradigm for Black advancement in ;be the Soll;.. African American proponents argued that the model held out the best hope for economic improvement and the cessation of racial antagonism in the region as well as for Blacks' greater control over their own destinies. Notwithstanding, many of the supposed benefits of industrial education proved illusory for both Blacks and Whites.

SOUTHERN PROGRESSIVES AND BLACK INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION: THEIR ROLES AND RESPONSES

Dabney of North Carolina clearly indicated the trajectory of progressive thought about Black education in his address to the fourth annual Conference for Education in the South in 1901. Though he vigorously endorsed universal education and compulsory attendance laws for both races, Dabney stressed that rather than nourish intellectual development, education should equip Blacks with manual skills while socializing them to a subordinate class position. In company with other White southern progressives, he argued that the educational neglect of African Americans would invariably lead to the debasement of their White superiors. As he cautioned, "The negro is in the South to stay-he is a necessity for southern industries-and the southern people must educate and elevate him or he will drag them down" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 85). Still, neither Dabney nor his progressive counterparts seemed to recognize the contradiction between this assertion and the premise of their racial paternalism, which held that Blacks were not ineluctably degenerating, as the racial extremists contended. Instead, they viewed Blacks as innocuous yet dependent children capable of moral and mental progress.

The element of collective White self-interest in southern progressives' motives and support was abundantly clear: educate the freedmen to meet current economic demands, or be prepared to accept the destabilizing social consequences. On the basis of these assumptions, it was a predictable leap for educators such as Dabney to adhere to the doctrine of industrial education for Blacks. Armstrong and Washington, Dabney argued, had "worked out a sensible plan for the education of the negro boys who come to their schools" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 85); thus, he asserted that their practical curricula should be the archetype of public schools in the South. In celebrating industrial education, Dabney disparaged the idea that Blacks should be educated in the liberal arts, stating: "Nothing is more ridiculous than the program of the good religious people from the North who insist upon teaching Latin, Greek, and philosophy to the negro boys who come to their schools" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 85). By dismissing the classical curriculum, however, Dabney signaled how far the educational ideology of the southern education movement had departed from the ideals of the Reconstruction era and of northern educational missionaries.3

Chancellor Hill drew a more explicit connection between Reconstruction, federal intervention in southern affairs, and liberal arts education. In an article published in the Southern Workman in 1904, Hill castigated the Blair Bill of 1890, which would have provided federal aid to the states based on the proportion of illiteracy in each. Although he defended the idea of federal support for education for both Blacks and Whites, Hill considered this piece of legislation an example of misplaced northern idealism. The bill's failure to make racial distinctions-and its provision of generous support for instruction in writing, reading, history, geography, and arithmetic-were particularly problematic in his view. Although the Blair Bill would ultimately have benefitted the South, given that region's high rate of illiteracy, Hill and many of his contemporaries believed that it was based upon the "erroneous idea" guiding northern philanthropy since the Civil War: that "the children of the Negro race were ready and ripe for the culture for which the children of the Anglo-Saxon race had been fitted by long centuries" (p. 7). Hill was also critical of the unwillingness of supporters of the Blair Bill to accept the "liberal and just view" that the distribution of federal funds for the education of Blacks should be controlled by White southerners (p. 7). Not surprisingly, he and others of his contemporaries in the southern progressive movement applauded the bill's defeat.

Like all progressive New Southerners, Hill (1904a) admitted the abuses of slavery and the timeliness of its demise. He also held that, to its credit, slavery had brought Blacks "in a century and a half from the condition of the savage to a status where. . .[they were] fitted for the privileges of American citizenship" (p. 78). Just as the discipline of slavery had taught Blacks the "virtues of order, fidelity temperance and obedience," he wrote, industrial education was also designed to inculcate moral virtue among the African American laboring classes (p. 78). Under the aegis of industrial education, Blacks could continue to receive the kinds of education they had received under slavery, Hill claimed. That education was not to be found in books but rather in the rigors of labor and "practical ethics" (p. 78). Indeed, Hill believed that the architects of Reconstruction had blundered. In his view, the biracial educational experiments of that era had yielded disappointing results and had contributed to the widespread belief that education "spoiled" Black labor capacity. Hill's conclusion was that Black education in the South "should be largely manual, industrial and agricultural, so as to be adapted to the real needs of the masses" (p. 79).

Notwithstanding his support of industrial education as the remedy for Black indigence and social instability, Hill (1904a) admitted that there was at least some place for the liberal arts in the curricula. As he wrote to George Foster Peabody, northern philanthropist and supporter of southern educational reforms, "You know I have no narrow views about industrial education being the only education for a negro" (Hill, 1904c, unnumbered page). Alone among the educators examined here, Hill endorsed liberal higher education for the limited number of Blacks privileged enough to take advantage of it. Yet, similar to Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington, he believed that universities should first and foremost train Blacks to be exponents of practical (industrial) education rather than critical thinkers and advocates of social equality.

Citing statistics showing that 85% of the South's laborers were gainfully employed in agriculture, Hill lamented the "pathetic significance" of such a large occupational force deficient in education related to their livelihoods (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 85). Disparaging the tendency of liberal education to lure children-and, by inference, Blacksaway from the land, he promoted industrial instruction as a means to stem the tide of rural depopulation and ensure a steady supply of labor for the South's largest economic sector. Surprisingly, he allowed for the professional training of Black lawyers and physicians, even if this concession opened a door of opportunity for Black social mobility that would disturb most White southerners. By and large, however, Hill maintained that Black colleges should train technical experts capable of administering an efficient, if not subtly coercive, system of education.

Despite his comparative ideological latitude, Hill's ideas about Black education were hemmed in by the racial assumptions endemic to the progressive movement. His relatively liberal voice was muffled by his own persistent commitment to racial control and White dominance. Echoing Dabney and other southern progressives, Hill encouraged a segregated educational system for African Americans that would bolster, not undermine, the southern racial status quo.

Hill's emphasis on training for agricultural employment harmonized with the northern industrialist plan to secure a steady supply of tenant labor for the cotton fields. Northern philanthropists like Robert Ogden also considered industrial education a reliable method of tying Black sharecroppers to the land during the period of urban growth and rural out-migration that marked the early years of the 20th century (Anderson, 1988). However, for all of their talk of "industrial" education, northern philanthropists and their southern allies generally believed that schools such as Hampton and Tuskegee should train Blacks for agricultural work. Most shared University of South Carolina President Mitchell's conviction that two occupations were suited to the region's Black and White inhabitants: "The field gives the negro his opportunity while the factory requires all the skills of the White man" (Mitchell n.d., p. 547).

Mitchell asserted that the sorting out of the two groups into racially determined spheres of work would maximize productivity, minimize racial tension, and promote southern economic development. He was unequivocal about the role of education in the division of southern labor: in his view, education was to make Blacks "more useful in industry" by providing training in "very practical things" (Mitchell, n.d., p. 549). Hill (1902) mirrored these views by postulating that education offered the only sensible solution to the South's race problem. Of course, he was referring to education derived not from books but "the education that means life, that, in the language of Booker T. Washington, fits the negro for agriculture and the making of a home" (unnumbered page). Such an education, he claimed, would result in the diminution, for the present, of African Americans political ambitions and activities.

University of Virginia President Alderman also played propagandist for industrial education. Like Hill and other progressives, Alderman's support for industrial education was erected upon a foundation of accommodating White racial prejudices. Blacks, he baldly asserted to a newspaper reporter in 1906, were an inferior race who required the control and leadership of the "more civilized" Whites (Alderman, n.d.-a, unnumbered page). Thus, regional progress depended on both the recognition of the disparities between the two races and the preservation of White racial integrity. As Alderman declared: "God made us White, and it is our business to stay White" (unnumbered page).

According to the reporter, Alderman's remarks "accurately and completely" reflected "intelligent public sentiment" on race relations (unnumbered page). Indeed, White southerners, having decided that social equality was unthinkable, were determined to enforce social separation and racial subordination. Surprisingly, however, Alderman claimed that southern Whites were equally committed to "do justice to the negro" (unnumbered page). He even suggested that a spirit of racial conciliation was moving across the South. In company with Mitchell, he rejected annihilation and deportation as solutions to the region's race problem, the latter of which had gained some currency among southern conservatives (Fredrickson, 1987). Alderman described both options as tantamount to "crime and stupidity" (unnumbered page). Education, he suggested, was the answer, but again, the education Alderman and Mitchell had in mind was worlds apart from the sort that had developed under the wing of missionary philanthropists and African American educators in the wake of the Civil War.

Alderman (1906) rejected the classical curriculum for Blacks, claiming that "training in the industrial arts promises the best returns in the development of the capacities of that race as workers and as elements in civic life" (p. 249-250). Alderman argued that industrial education would teach Blacks the virtues of frugality and hard work, essential for even modest racial advancement. The success of Hampton and Tuskegee provided sociological evidence of Blacks' enthusiasm for this type of education. It also demonstrated the willingness of these institutions' students to endure hardships to acquire education, the potential of the many gifted leaders among the Black race trained at such schools, and, of course, the sympathy of the White race for Black advancement. Apparently, neither paid much attention to evidence suggesting the resiliency of the classical curriculum at most private Black colleges of their day. Instead, Alderman, Mitchell, Dabney, Hill, and other progressives were satisfied by Washington's assurances that the Black South uniformly endorsed industrial education.

RESPONSES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATORS AND WHITE EDUCATORS AT BLACK INSTITUTIONS TO INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

While defending liberal higher education for African Americans, Black opponents of the Hampton-Tuskegee model denounced industrial education as an instrument of racial subordination and an obsolete form of technical instruction (Anderson, 1988; Meier, 1966). For many of those antagonistic to this program, Booker T. Washington-widely viewed as the principal liaison between northern philanthropy, southern White educators, and Black educational leaders-became the focus of their attacks. John Hope, president of historically Black Atlanta Baptist College and member of the Niagara Movement (the predecessor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]), was among the most sharply critical of Washington and his ideas (Meier, 1966). At an Atlanta University conference in 1899, Hope disputed Washington's contention that Black poverty could be explained by deficiency in industrial skills. He also rejected Washington's assertion that Black disfranchisement could be reconciled with Black advancement. The social progress of African Americans, Hope argued, would come not through courses in gardening and crafts, but through competition with Whites on a level economic and political playing field. Under Hope's administration, Atlanta Baptist College focused its efforts on liberal higher education. However, the college paid the price of doing so in financial neglect from the powerful philanthropic agencies that guided southern educational expansion, which were largely influenced by Washington and his associates.

Hope's critique of the Hampton-Tuskegee model was bolstered by the vigorous antiaccommodationist stances of William Monroe Trotter and W. E. B. DuBois. Trotter, the editor of the Boston Guardian and a founding member of the Niagara Movement, joined Hope and DuBois as a vehement critic of the "Tuskegee Machine." Trotter asserted that "the idea lying back of [the Hampton-Tuskegee model] is the relegating of a race to serfdom" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 105). He additionally argued that racial prejudice and economic self-interest underlay White support of industrial instruction. DuBois, a professor at Atlanta University and one of the leading Black intellectuals of the 20th century, excoriated Washington's philosophy of Black racial adjustment and submission as well as his program of industrial education. DuBois argued that industrial education fostered Black subordination to Whites. The program had its merits, DuBois argued, but African Americans' intellectual leadership and cultural ferment, not to mention their genuine economic development, required higher education and education in the liberal arts. While acknowledging the many contributions Washington and Tuskegee had made to Black education, he nonetheless challenged the disparagement of Black liberal education by White and Black exponents of industrial education. In a chapter entitled "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" in his now-famous The Souls of Black Folk (1903 / 1990), DuBois perceptively concluded that industrial education was in complicity with New South materialism and White supremacy. For its tendency "to regard human beings as among the material resources of land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends," DuBois cited industrial education as one of the key elements in Washington's policy of "silent submission to civic inferiority" (p. 42).

A coterie of northern and southern Black intellectuals including Charles Chesnutt, Bishop Alexander Walters, Calvin Chase, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, other members of the Niagara Movement, and editors of prominent Black newspapers of the day joined Trotter and DuBois in maintaining a steady stream of opposition to industrial education for African Americans. Despite these objections, Black industrial institutes patterned after the Hampton-Tuskegee model secured an increasingly strong foothold as the 20th century unfolded.

Administrators of southern Black colleges were not the only White opponents of the Hampton-Tuskegee model. In the 1890s, for example, William T. Harris, chair of the United States Commission of Education, reprimanded the attendees at the Lake Mohonk Conference for their endorsement of discriminatory pedagogical policies, the idea of industrial education for Blacks being chief among these schemes. Sponsored by philanthropist Albert K. Smile and attended by the leading educational activists of the day, these annual conferences, held in upstate New York, were meant to foster discussion of racial issues among White elites. In 1890 and 1891, the focus of the meetings was primarily on questions of education, and the Hampton-Tuskegee program met with the enthusiastic approval of those assembled. Harris, however, excoriated the conference attendees' assumption that it was "in the power of one class to determine the metes and bounds of another class" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 88). He championed instead "the Negroes' right to an education from a,b, up to Syriac. . . or, if there is anything higher than that, that higher thing, what ever it may be" (p. 88).

The pedagogical opinions of White southern progressives stood in stark contrast to those held by many White administrators of Black colleges. White educators at historically Black colleges may have shared the assumptions of racial accommodationists, but they refused to throw barriers up between Blacks and the highest forms of education. As Henry S. DeForest of the American Missionary Association's Talladega College argued, "while all should have the lower education, a great many should receive the higher" (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 87). Talladega thus offered industrial instruction, but its primary purpose, DeForest pointed out, was to extend "choice scholarship" to Black students (p. 87). George Sale, president of Atlanta Baptist College, told the Georgia Teachers Association of his opposition to "the idea that the education of the Negro should be exclusively or distinctly industrial" (Anderson, 1988, p. 87). Sale went on to ask the assembled teachers why classical education would be any less edifying for Blacks than it was for Whites. E. C. Mitchell of Leland University in New Orleans registered an eminently practical criticism of industrial education. Training for the trades at Black colleges was pointless, he argued, because "every village has its negro mechanics who are patronized both by White and colored employees, and any who wish to learn the trade can do so" (p. 87).

THE ASCENT OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN THE NEW SOUTH

Focusing exclusive attention on the widely documented controversy generated by the educational debates between Washington and DuBois obscures the fact that industrial education failed to achieve uncontested dominance by the late-19th century. Hampton founder Samuel Armstrong was encouraged, however, by the adoption of industrial courses at several Black colleges in the 1880s (Anderson, 1978). To him, increasing emphasis on vocational training at traditional liberal arts schools heralded the ascendance of the Hampton-Tuskegee model. Schools operated by northern mission societies offered practical training courses at the secondary and college level, often times financed by the Slater Fund, a northern philanthropy for southern Black education. Yet, as Anderson (1988) has documented, industrial education at most Black colleges during the postbellum period was of marginal significance to their curricula. Colleges supervised by Black religious organizations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, were even more adamant about assigning industrial training to an inferior position in the college curriculum. Unlike Hampton, most of the these institutions advocated the training of engineers, architects, and factory supervisors sufficiently educated in the elements of a classical education. Believing that the Hampton program was predicated on racial control leaders of missionary-sponsored private Black colleges overwhelmingly developed liberal arts and professional education programs favorable to the burgeoning African American movement for political and civil rights (Anderson, 1988).

Despite this early lack of momentum, Mitchell (1911) noted that the education offered by schools such as Hampton, Tuskegee, and the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute at Petersburg reflected the "common sense aim of the Southern Education Board, which, along with other agencies, is ushering in a new era in the South" (p. 549). Although the connection between White philanthropy and Black colleges was well established before the advent of the progressive movement, the SEB's endorsement of industrial instruction for Blacks grew in inverse proportion to its support of Black common schools. Although industrial education was not flourishing spontaneously in the South by the early 1900s, southern progressives and northern philanthropists consoled themselves with the belief that the success of the Hampton-Tuskegee model would one day fulfil the objective of universal education for the nation's Blacks.

To be sure, educational progressives affiliated with the SEB were not solely responsible for the glaring inequities between public expenditures on White and Black common schools. Hill and others opposed the efforts of legislators to divide educational taxes along racial lines, which would have allocated to Black schools only those funds gained from the taxation of Black citizens. Yet shortly after its founding in 1901, the SEB resolved to downplay its influence on Black education, with Dabney and other Board members agreeing that they "would not emphasize the negro too much. . .In the excited state of public sentiment, this was considered wisest" (Harlan, 1968, p. 52). At an SEB meeting in 1906, Alderman claimed that Booker T. Washington's dinner with President Roosevelt had made the discussion of Black education imprudent. "It has been like touching a sore tooth," he told the Board (Ogden, 1906, unnumbered page). In response to George Foster Peabody's suggestion for a crusade on behalf of Black education, Alderman argued that "Progress does not lie that way. We want now to influence public sentiment: stop being silent but be wise; go forward, but with forethought" (Ogden, 1906, unnumbered page).

The SEB's position, formulated by Dabney, Alderman, and other leading southern White progressive educators, was that White education would inevitably benefit Black education. Although none of these educators ever fully explained this calculus, they continued to make perfunctory overtures toward shaping Black instruction. Frightened by the prospect that a backlash against Black public education might jeopardize the progressive effort to upgrade White common schools, and satisfied that Tuskegee and its counterparts would disperse the benefits of industrial education throughout the South, these educational reformers placed what could be considered, in effect, a moratorium on active support for Black public education. With equal decisiveness, they avoided any statements that might challenge the orthodoxy of "separate-but-equal" schools (Harlan, 1958).

Subsequently, it was not until the waning years of the 19th century that the Hampton-Tuskegee model began to achieve favored status among White northern philanthropists and educators (Anderson, 1978). By the late 1890s, advocates of this model were well aware that their efforts to supplant liberal education with industrial training at Black colleges and universities had not been successful. They also understood that missionary educators committed to the traditional curriculum would oppose the advance of technical education at Black schools. In the face of such opposition, Anderson notes, proponents of the model began to disseminate industrial education with "dogmatic determination" (p. 89). Relying largely on the advice of Booker T. Washington, northern philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller channeled substantial sums of money into the development of Black institutions offering industrial education and vocational training. Convinced of the social benefits of the industrial education model, Carnegie directed his philanthropic foundation's entire budget for Black education between 1900 and 1910 to the support of Tuskegee and Hampton (Peeps, 1981). By 1915, philanthropic appropriations to Black industrial schools in the South far outweighed those for Black liberal arts colleges. The Hampton Institute's endowment stood that year at $2.7 million, while Tuskegee's had risen to $1.9 million. Cumulatively, these two institutions' endowments accounted for over half the total endowment of private Black colleges in the United States. By comparison, Lincoln University, the most generously funded Black liberal arts college of the period, could claim an endowment of only $700,000 (Peeps, 1981). As Peeps notes, the consequences of northern philanthropists' "primarily industrial orientation was fiscal disinterest in Negro colleges that promoted liberal education and more generous attention to the recognized industrial institutions" (p. 261).

Southern White educational progressives collaborated in the effort to attract northern financial support for industrial education for Blacks and to expand its reach throughout the South. As northern philanthropy underwrote the development of industrial education in the South, southern educational leaders like Alderman, Mitchell, Hill, and Dabney provided it with an ideological framework. To be sure, northern philanthropists like Robert Ogden extolled the virtues of industrial education for Blacks (Anderson, 1988), yet the southern progressives provided the intellectual medium between northern dollars and southern opinion. When addressing northern audiences, they presented themselves as authorities on the race question, offering their ideas as representative of the region's better classes. They lent the prestige of their universities to the movement for a segregated system of education that was anything but equal. Northern reformers applauded the southern progressives for vigorously advocating the realignment of southern schools according to "northern standards of efficiency and social organization" (Anderson, 1988). Cloaked in pseudo-scientific language that appealed to the sensibilities of the era, these southern university leaders marketed industrial education as a rational method of achieving racial control and economic advantage. They also cemented the association between their own educational movement and the Hampton-Tuskegee model. As a result, industrial education joined sharecropping, the crop-lien, wage slavery, extractive manufacturing, illiteracy, and disfranchisement as one of the pillars of an impoverished and already racially stratified New South.

CONCLUSION

Although many White southern progressive educators believed that industrial education was perfectly suited to racial control and economic productivity, it fit equally well into the pedagogical template at the center of the ideology of southern progress. Industrial education complemented the technical instruction promoted at the Whites-only state universities where many progressive educators held leadership positions. Their view of the South's future was one in which technically trained professionals would construct a modem, efficient region using pliable Black and White laborers. In effect, southern progressives extended their philosophy of service-oriented, practical education to Black schooling while extolling liberal education as a source of cultural refinement among White college students. Given such a functionalist approach to education for Blacks, it was easy to proscribe classical instruction as a means of Black social advancement and to advocate industrial education as a means of maintaining White social control.

Abandoning everything but the rhetoric of support for Black education, southern progressives and northern philanthropists viewed industrial education as their best hope for achieving the goal of racial accommodation. However, they were surprised by the tenacity of both Black and White resistance to this idea. Some of this resistance came from within southern state universities themselves. In 1900, Paul B. Barringer, then chairman of the faculty of the University of Virginia, advocated the termination of public support for Black schools on the grounds that Blacks were using education as a "weapon of political offence" against southern Whites (quoted in Anderson, 1988, p. 96). Barringer also accused these institutions of encouraging Black indolence and competition with Whites. Richard Heath Dabney, professor of history and economics at the University of Virginia and a strong supporter of educational modernization, ridiculed the idea of levying taxes to educate disfranchised Blacks (Anderson, 1988).

The opposition of White southern academics to the idea of public support for Black education suggests that the region's universities were not transformed wholesale by educational progressivism. It also suggests that not all progressives shared the enthusiasm for industrial education expressed by many of their leading contemporaries (Anderson, 1988). Indeed, many White southern progressive university leaders had little interest in jeopardizing the public funding on which their universities relied by approving a form of education that implicitly endorsed Black social equality. Unfortunately for the progressives, the educational horse on which they placed their bets caused almost as much controversy as might have been expected from their support of Black higher education.

Yet, if southern progressive educators were apologists for racial stratification, to many of the region's Blacks they represented the harbingers of a more humane, if not just, racial order. The progressive agenda, which included the advancement of the social sciences and academic professionalization, was part of a larger intellectual reorientation affecting the early 20th-century South (Singal, 1982). The study of cultural anthropology, economics, and sociology at institutions of higher education such as the universities of Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina, encouraged the emergence of a modernist temperament that eschewed rigid, Victorian-era definitions of culture and morality dominant. In its place, the progressive movement cultivated intellectual sensibilities that were more tolerant of cultural relativism and moral uncertainty. It subsequently promoted new insights into the power of the irrational and the structural determinants of social behavior.

This intellectual framework permitted educated southerners to analyze, in a decidedly more critical manner, the social pathologies that gripped southern society. For example, during the administration of David S. Barrow, who succeeded Walter Hill as chancellor of the University of Georgia, professors Robert Preston Brooks and R. J. H. DeLoach, among others, participated in the University Commission on Southern Race Questions, an organization dedicated to racial reform. An adjunct of the Southern Sociological Conference, the Commission whittled away at the popular belief that Blacks' transgressions were at the root of lynchings. Instead, they attributed group violence against Blacks to poverty, illiteracy, and rural conservatism. A recipient of a grant from the Phelps-Stokes Fund in 1912, Alderman's University of Virginia endowed a chair in sociology for the study of race relations. For Alderman and others, the grant signified the advent of a more rational approach to race issues. As he noted, "The thing to do is to take it out of the nervous system of our people and their emotions, and to get it set up before them as a great human problem-economic in nature, scientific in character" (Alderman, n.d.-b, unnumbered page). Alderman's efforts helped create an atmosphere of social inquiry hospitable to the pioneering sociological critiques of Rupert Vance, Arthur Raper, and Howard Odum, among others, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Progressive educators sought to transform the southern social order from one marred by poverty and racial conflict to one built upon industrial productivity and racial harmony. Central to their scheme for a new South, however, was an insidious program of social engineering and racial control. Cloaking their ideas on race in the language of objectivity and evangelical uplift, they clouded the elements of coercion and racism inherent in their educational program. Southern higher education became entangled in the broader crusade to educate Blacks in subservience. As a result, the history of the progressive educational movement in the South is virtually inseparable from the history of "Jim Crow" segregation.

1 Progressivism is defined here as a New South ideology of material progress and sectional harmony, joined to the broader effort of controlling economic development in the region in the interest of social stability. To this end, progressives from a wide variety of backgrounds endorsed plans for educational improvement, child labor reform, the regulation of public utilities, and segregation. The common objective among progressives was the orderly regulation of social change, economic development, regional integrity, and racial control. The New South ideology set out a program of economic progress through industrial development, peaceful coexistence with the North, and agricultural diversification. The first of these required social stability, which in turn depended on racial harmony. Racial antagonism, New South boosters argued, would scare away northern investors. Equally important, economic advancement required the inclusion of Blacks in the social order. As "racial accommodationists," the term historian George Fredrickson (1987) uses to describe White southern progressives, advocates of the New South ideology maintained a commitment to biracialism but joined it to the conviction that Black economic advancement and racial harmony were beneficial to the entire South (Grantham, 1983).

2 Of course, the progressive program for industrial education won White supporters as well as detractors. However, the reformers' most formidable support came from newspapers such as Georgia's Atlanta Constitution, Alabama's Birmingham News, Virginia's Richmond Times, South Carolina's Columbia State, and North Carolina's Raleigh News and Observer.

3 This is not to suggest that northern missionary educators were free of racial prejudice. However, their pedagogical agenda combined literary and practical instruction to an extent that schools following the Hampton-Tuskegee model did not. Nonetheless, the predilection of northern philanthropist and southern educators for the belief in Black cultural inferiority, which translated into the conviction that Blacks could not be expected to achieve social equality in the near future, ushered in the philosophy of industrial education. Indeed, Adams (1983) asserts that Samuel Armstrong's acceptance of this view "resulted in a curriculum that placed more emphasis on manual and industrial training than was the case with other missionary models of black education" (p. 103).

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Michael Dennis, Department of History, Trent University (Ontario, Canada)

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