"Tell them we are rising."
Note: awesome quote abt ga freedmen and confidence
"Hampton Idea," essentially called for the effective removal of black voters and politicians from southern political life, the relegation of black workers to the lowest forms of labor in the southern economy, and the establishment of a general southern racial hierarchy. He expected that the work of adjusting blacks to this social arrangement would be carried out by indigenous black educators, particularly teachers and principals, aided by Hampton-styled industrial normal schools, state departments of education, local schooll boards, and northern white philanthropists.
In his view, the "Colored people" could "afford to let politics severely alone." He maintained, for instance, that black participation in politics in South Carolina resulted in a "shameless legislature" that had "ruined the credit of a great state."
The freedmen's chief misfortunes were "low ideas of honor, and morality, want of foresight and energy, and vanity." In short, Armstrong contended that the white race was mentally and morally strong, and the black race was mentally capable but morally feeble.
In establishing moral development as the decisive cultural basis of political and civil equality, Armstrong, wittingly or unwittingly, ideologically precluded even property-owning and educated blacks from participation in the body politic. Property and education, he argued, could be acquired in a generation, but moral development, and by extension readiness for parliamentary government, took centuries
"Negroes" constituted over one-third of the region's population.
The planters believed that schooling would raise blacks' political and economic aspirations and ruin them as agricultural and domestic laborers. Armstrong held a deep faith in the powerful capacity of moral andindustrial education to socialize blacks to understand and accept their disfranchisement and to make them more productive laborers.
real trouble of the colored teachers," he complained, "is with a class of preachers, politicians, and editors of their own race who resent the introduction of intelligent ideas into religion and into the relations of life. They could easily be conciliated by substituting Latin for labor." Armstrong opposed the existing system of college and normal school training for blacks and campaigned relentlessly for the Hampton model.'
Armstrong held a lifelong suspicion of highly educated blacks, believing that their aspirations were vain and dysfunctional to his views of southern Reconstruction.
manual labor rather than scholarship became Hampton's chief criterion for educational excellence.
"One who shirks labor may be a fine mathematician," noted Armstrong, but "the blockhead at the black board may be a shining example in the cornfield."
The heart of Hampton's manual labor program was established in 1879, when Armstrong created the night school with Booker T. Washington as principal. It opened with 36 students who were required to labor ten hours per day, six days per week, eleven months per year fortwo years. Two years of night school work were equivalent to one year of the normal school course. In their last two years of normal school the students had to study four days and work two days during each week.
Moreover, when it is considered that nearly all of Hampton's "rebel" students were probably dismissed during the "weeding-out" season, the protest of those who remained is particularly insightful and illuminating.
The "carpenters," like the shoemakers, were trained to be handymen rather than craftsmen or artisans.
Hampton Institute, does not seem to stand in high favor with the colored people of the east."
The mission societies emphasizedliterary and professional training to develop a black intelligentsia that would fight for political and civil equality.
higher education of a black "talented tenth."
Reverend Roy, secretary of the American Missionary Association, after making a brilliant defense of blacks' right to higher education, informed the Hampton supporters that it was "too late in the history of civilization to impose any repression upon anyclass of people."
Booker T. Washington's rise to national prominence in 1895 breathed new life into the Hampton idea and accounted in large part for its fame and achievements during the early twentieth century.
On 18 September 1895, Washington delivered his widely publicized "Atlanta Compromise."
Washington and Tuskegee were Armstrong and Hampton in blackface.
From their founding to the late Lgzos, Hampton and Tuskegee werenot trade schools, nor academic schools worthy of the name, but schools that attempted to train a corps of teachers with a particular social philosophy relevant to the political and economic reconstruction of the South.
As Ogden, the president of the Hampton Board of Trustees, declared: "The main hope is in Hampton and Hampton ideas. Our first problem is to support the School; our second to make the School ideas national." Or, as Hampton Trustee Collis Potter Huntington put it, "The only question is, Where shall we get another Booker T. Washington for these other schools?" William H. Baldwin, Jr., the president of Tuskegee Institute Board of Trustees, said to Washington: "I tell you again that your course is the only one, and the work must be organized in other states, and you must do it, and we must get the money.""'
Note: Silver bullet
Beginning in 1898, the Hampton model constantly gained support among northern businessmen-philanthropists and southern whites.
Consequently, philanthropic and southern white crusaders for universal public education wished to substitute education for older and cruder methods of socialization and control.
Modeled after the Lake Mohonk conferences on the Negro question, the first three annual meetings were private and informal, and no black persons were invited or permitted to attend.
Noticeably absent also were members of northern missionary societies.
Baldwin, who entered the South to organize the Southern Railroad, remained acutely aware of the region's cotton mills and their relationship to increased industrialization.
Baldwin also viewed black laborers as a potential force to protect the South's economy against the onslaught of unionized labor.
He praised Tuskegee because there black students were "educated for their environment and not out of it."
Georgia's Governor Allen D. Candler, who attempted in 1898 to cut his state's meager school fund in half, informed the philanthropists in 1901 that "we can attend to the education of the darky in the South without the aid of these yankees."
intact. Two characteristics of their opposition evidenced their good insights into the complications of southern society. First, the major concerns reflected constantly in the opposition to universal education were fears of political instability and increased competition between black and white laborers. Second, the opposition to universal education for all children came largely from the states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In this context, education was viewed as a two-edged sword. The same instructional process that taught the children of illiterate farm workers to read and write about industrial arts also enabled them to read and sign their names to voting ballots. In these states the majority of the agricultural workers were black, ranging from a low of 40 percent in Virginia to a high of 69 percent in Mississippi.
Consequently, black education became the ideological medium of conflict between southern whites' wishes for the preservation of traditional, coercive methods of subordination and the educational reformers' demands for modern, subtle forms of social control.
the "educational awakening" as either Yankee meddling in southern affairs, a cause of high taxation, or a scheme to promote racial equality.
"Atlanta Compromise,"
Both Washington and DuBois, however, looked primarily to the "selected youth" (prospective teachers, editors, ministers, and businessmen) to guide the race's social development. DuBois, of course, stated boldly his interest in the "talented tenth" whereas Washington often kept in the background his central concern with training prospective race leaders.
Ogden, Peabody, and other philanthropists urged DuBois to join Tuskegee's faculty.
Significantly, DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, with a critical essay on Washington, was published in April 1903. After its publication DuBois was recognized as Washington's chief opponent.