Opening the Gates

The fifth chapter explores how theological education was opened to women, African Americans, and working class whites. Congregationalist Mary Lyon founded Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (1837) to provide a rigorous education built on the liberal arts, theology, personal discipline, and domestic work—all designed to produce independent women for missions. Other women, like Methodist Lucy Rider, founded religious training schools for women in their denominations. For African Americans, pioneers like AME Bishop Daniel Payne, who revived Wilberforce University (1856), developed a blend of liberal arts and theological education. W. E. B. Dubois fought for this model as the way to educate “the talented tenth” needed for racial uplift. The other model, pioneered by Samuel Armstrong at the Hampton Institute (VA) and Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee (Alabama), combined a religious training school with industrial work so that black pastors and teachers could be self-supporting. Finally, Bible colleges, like that of Dwight Moody, opened theological studies to working people with only a basic education. Emma Dryer brought practical, normal school approaches to the beginnings of the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago. Under Dr. R. A. Torrey, MBI combined a literal reading of Scripture with experiential holiness, spiritual healing, end-times prophecy, and practical business methods—all of which marked the future fundamentalist movement.

Not Just the Raising of Money: Hampton Institute and Relationship Fundraising, 1893–1917

This article examines the workings of Hampton Institute's external relations program to show how the school developed loyal supporters and donors. By 1900, Hampton was the wealthiest school for African Americans, and its philosophy—stressing vocational education and forsaking political equality—was at its most influential during this time, attracting numerous followers as well detractors. Little has been written about how Hampton actually raised money and few have explored in any detail why it was so successful in fundraising. Hampton's leaders developed a comprehensive, state-of-the-art external relations program that forged meaningful connections with its supporters. Hampton's coordinated outreach efforts were highly effective at getting its message to its target audience—wealthy White Northerners—making them feel closely connected to Hampton and its students, as well as making them feel, through their support of Hampton, that they were part of solving the so-called race problem.

Thomas Jesse Jones, the Phelps Stokes Commissions, and Education for Social Welfare in Colonial Africa

During the 1920s and 1930s American strategies for racial social engineering had a major impact of colonial education policy in Africa. During this time the ideas of the American educator Thomas Jesse Jones held a broad audience among Christian missions and colonial governments and the recommendations he made in the two Phelps Stokes Education Commission reports he authored became the basis for educational reforms primarily in British held African colonies but also other colonial territories as well. Jones drew attention to himself in early 20th-century America for promoting the application of the sociological theories of his mentor Franklin Giddings to the tasks associated with educating European immigrants to what he identified as America’s Anglo-Saxon values. Jones made a name for himself, however, by rethinking Giddings ideas to apply to non- white American populations such as African Americans and Native Americans. Significantly, Jones identified the industrial education strategies he argued were followed at Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute as offering the most useful approach to adjudicating racial tensions between white Americans and black Americans. Making use of his position as education director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, an educational philanthropy dedicated to non-white education, Jones came to influence all philanthropic giving directed toward African American and Native American schools. Jones’s ideas appealed to American Christian liberals, who recommended him to the British Colonial Office and Christian liberals in Britain as someone who could resolve the mounting tensions over colonial development between Europeans and Africans in Africa. Jones advocated the introduction of Hampton Institute-/Tuskegee Institute-style industrial education in Africa, by which he meant education towards social amelioration and community development, but also education away from notions of citizenship and political rights. His ideas about social amelioration and community development took root and facilitated a social revolution in Africa with the creation of new corps of social welfare providers such as teachers and nurses. Jones’s ideas about educating Africans away from political mobilization failed, as the people trained as social welfare providers joined the front ranks of Africans demanding an end to colonialism.

Chemists Who Work for the National Labs or Other Federal Agencies

Dr. Patricia Carter Sluby (Fig. 5.1) is a primary patent examiner retired from the US Patent and Trademark Office and formerly a registered patent agent. She is also the author of three books about African American inventors and their patented inventions. Patricia’s father is William A. Carter Jr., and her mother is Thelma LaRoche Carter. Her father was the first black licensed master plumber in Richmond, VA, and his father also had the same distinction in Columbus, OH, years earlier. Her father was born in Philadelphia, PA, and attended college. Her grandfather went from Virginia to look for work in Canada and became a stonemason. Later he relocated back to the United States, where he soon married in Boston, MA, and several of his children were born there. Later, the family moved to Philadelphia where Patricia’s father was born. Her mother, who attended Hampton Institute, taught school and later managed the office for Patricia’s father’s business. Patricia’s mother was born and raised in Richmond, as were most of her maternal relatives. Patricia had three brothers. They were all born during segregation in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Patricia was born on February 15, in Richmond. She attended kindergarten through eighth grade in segregated schools that were within walking distance of home. In school, they studied from hand-me-down books, but her black teachers were well trained and well informed. They had bachelor’s degrees; some had master’s or even PhD degrees. To go to high school, Patricia took a city bus across to the east side of town, to the newly built school for black students, which incorporated eighth grade through twelfth grade. Her teachers were excellent instructors who lived in her neighborhood and knew her parents quite well. The teachers looked out for the neighborhood kids and acted as surrogate parents out­side the confines of the home. Teachers and principals were also great mentors, dedicated to their craft; they encouraged students to understand the world and function as responsible adults. Patricia excelled in science and math.

Williams, Charles H. (1896–1978)

In a career spanning 1910–1951, Charles H. Williams was a pioneering educator, author, choreographer, and athletic director at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, an all-Black school that focused on the vocational education of young people. His interest in dance came from his work developing new ways to connect physical education, creative movement, and recreation with self-improvement and moral development. Echoing the New Negro philosophy of the Harlem Renaissance and paralleling the efforts of Edna Guy, Hemsley Winfield, and Asadata Dafora, he believed that dance served the important purpose of connecting African Americans to their heritage. Inspired in part by his association with modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn, he founded the Hampton Institute Creative Dance Group in 1934. At a time when higher education was largely segregated, this non-professional African-American concert dance group toured nationally and, in so doing, created a place for modern dance within historically Black colleges and an audience for modern dance among the Black middle-class.

Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915)

Born into slavery in Virginia, Booker Taliaferro Washington was the most prominent spokesman for Black Americans at the end of the 19th century. After attending the Hampton Institute, a school established to educate freedmen (freed black slaves), he was named head of the new Tuskegee Institute, a teachers college in Alabama that, like Hampton, would become one of the historically black universities in the United States. At Tuskegee, Washington earned the respect of a wide array of white businessmen, industrialists, and philanthropists, from George Eastman and Julius Rosenwald (a president of Sears, Roebuck and Company) to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Washington’s most important intellectual contribution may have been his Atlanta Address of 1895. In the midst of Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation, which arose in response to failed reconstruction policies in the American South, Washington argued that the direct legal confrontation of the segregation of white and black Americans was premature. Instead, in his address at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 (also known as the "Atlanta Compromise"), Washington argued for a slow, ameliorative approach to racial equality and desegregation, one that emphasized technical and industrial schooling, self-help, and success in business in order to demonstrate a black citizenry capable of responsible and reliable political participation, one deserving of full civil rights, including equal access to electoral polls (that is, free of poll taxes and literary tests) and equal representation before the law.

Reassessing the Vocational Origins of Hampton University and Celebrating a Singular History of Arts Engagement

This essay explores historical interpretation or categorizations of Hampton Institute as a vocational project in order to reassert liberal arts as an underlying philosophical tenet of the founding and early history of this now venerated historically Black university. Today, Hampton’s educational mission and its museum are understood to be within the liberal arts tradition. This essay argues Hampton’s nineteenth-century founding ethos also situates the university and museum within the spirit of liberal arts education, even where vocational or manual labor components of its early curriculum may have been defining in early twentieth century historical interpretations of the institution’s mission and purpose. Contributions of the Hampton University Museum throughout its history give readers insight into the Hampton tradition of educating hand, heart, and mind and speak to the university’s 150-year engagement with liberal arts.

Innovators, Imitators, and a Jubilee Industry

The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.