"They Dared to Call Their Souls Their Own"
The Classics as a Tool of Resistance and Social Uplift
This project proposes to examine the little-known history of the teaching of Greek and Latin at black colleges in the United States from the 1850s to the present. This tradition began before the Civil War, but really gained ground after the war's cessation as African American ex-slaves, Northern missionaries, the Union Army, and Northern philanthropists all began the immense task of trying to educate a newly freed people. It is important to understand that the adoption of Greek and Latin at black colleges was not a mimicking of Northern, European-inspired education. It was instead a deliberate choice made by African Americans and others (including the white teachers who came from the North and abroad) for a variety of reasons. First, they knew that in the United States mastery of Greek and Latin was the irreproachable sign of an educated human being and, if they were to be equal, they too would need to gain mastery of these languages. Second, as early as the eighteenth century, African American scholars had been making a connection between Northern Africa, the Mediterranean, and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Thus, in a very real sense, these scholars believed that "the classical civilizations" belonged as much to them as to white Europeans. Third, African Americans could, as their white counterparts, draw inspiration from Republican Rome as the model for the politics and culture of the early United States. By the 1870s and 1880s, courses in Greek and Latin language and literature at black colleges were enjoying what could be called "a Golden Age." The listing of classical courses at schools such as Fisk and Wilberforce rivaled those of white institutions. It was the time of a number of prominent black classicists, most notably William Sanders Scarborough. Scarborough and the small cadre of black classicists extended themselves beyond the academy and, indeed, became true "public intellectuals," involving themselves in civil rights work, state politics, women's suffrage, and the fight against Jim Crow.
Beginning just after the peak of the Golden Age, with the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the tide began to turn sharply against the classical model. Current histories would have us believe that the ascendancy of the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial/utilitarian education was, with the exception of a few small bumps (most notably W. E. B. Du Bois and a few other black intellectuals), a smooth and inevitable one. What our research demonstrates is that there was a widespread resistance, black and white, from prep schools to universities, to the diminution of the classics, often at the risk of losing one's livelihood or a school's accreditation and/or funding. For example, at Florida State Normal and Industrial School (now Florida A & M), the first four presidents were fired for their refusal to drop the classics from the curriculum. In addition, the school suffered a reduction in funding because of their actions. While some of the resistance was an outright refusal to change the classical curriculum to one of industrial/utilitarian training, as often as not, this resistance came in the form of deliberate dissemblance. At the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, when the white overseers came to visit, the school's principal, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, would have the students stop their lessons in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and other liberal arts subjects, and pick up brooms, mops, and hoes in order to impress the white visitors with Brown's "dedication" to utilitarian education. But once the visitors left, the brooms, mops, and hoes would be put away and the students would return to their lessons. This scenario would be played out at other black schools as well.
However, all this resistance could not stem the tide of the forces arrayed against classical education. Increasingly, after the 1890s, funding by benefactors, foundations, and state and local governments were tied to the schools' willingness to adopt the utilitarian model (which was also becoming the dominant educational philosophy for most non-elite education in the United States; witness John Dewey). In the rest of the United States, white education was being segregated along class lines, so that the industrial model was for working-class white students, while their "social betters" still had access to classical education. Within African America, particularly in the South, there was not class segregation, but racial segregation, so that almost all African American students only had access to industrial/utilitarian training.
By the time of World War II, the fate of black colleges and universities appeared to be sealed. With the growth of more desegregated education in the North and access to wider education in the South, the special role played by the black institutions in the South was being eclipsed. At an increasing rate, they have been losing accreditation, students, and stature. Within a generation, the whole tradition of black colleges and universities (with the exception of a few elite institutions, like Spelman and Howard) may be seen as anachronistic as the teaching of Greek and Latin at these very same schools.
This project is extending the latest literature on black college education in a number of ways. For example, we agree with Anderson and Moss, Dangerous Donations (1999), who argue that James Anderson's Education of Blacks in the South (1988), while the most comprehensive study of black education, paints the early twentieth century with too broad a brush. A great deal was happening and he simply missed it. While
Dangerous Donations goes a long way in explaining who the philanthropists to black education were and why they gave, it fails to assess whether these donations were used to support industrial education. We are finding case after case where they did not, which calls into question the efficacy of these donations and highlight even more just how much resistance there was among faculty and students to the enforced implementation of industrial education.