Southeast

The chapter “Southeast” explains about scientific and technological sites of adult interest in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, including the Tuskegee Institute, Edison & Ford Winter Estates, Atlanta Botanical Garden, Wright Brothers National Memorial, The Rice Museum, Monticello, and Blenko Glass Company. The traveler is provided with essential information, including addresses, telephone numbers, hours of entry, handicapped access, dining facilities, dates open and closed, available public transportation, and websites. Nearly every site included here has been visited by the authors. Although written with scientists in mind, this book is for anyone who likes to travel and visit places of historical and scientific interest. Included are photographs of many sites within each state.

A Higher Mission

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, alumni and students from historically black colleges and universities contributed to the American Protestant mission movement in West Africa. Those contributions extended beyond the manual labor endeavors promoted by Booker T. Washington and the Phelps Stokes Fund; African American missionaries also adapted classical studies and self-help ideology to a transnational context. This book analyzes the effects and significance of black education strategies through the ministries of Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston from 1902 to 1941. Brown specialized in language, music, and cultural analysis while her husband engaged in preaching, agricultural research, and mediation on behalf of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission in what became the Belgian Congo. Personal and professional partnership motivated the two missionaries to interpret their responsibilities as a combination of training from Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Stillman Institute. Each of these institutions held a symbolic meaning in the contexts of the Southern Presbyterian Church and European colonialism in Africa. Denominational administrators and colonial officials understood African American missionaries as leaders with the potential to challenge racial hierarchies. This perception influenced the shifting relations between African Christians and black missionaries during the development of village churches. The Edmistons’ pedagogical interest in adapting to local conditions encouraged Presbyterian converts and students to promote their interests and their authority within the Congo Mission. At the same time, occasional segregation and expulsion of African American missionaries from overseas ministry enabled them to influence early civil rights activities in the American South.

Congo Missionaries and the Perpetuation of Manual Labor, 1908–1936

Chapter 2 analyzes the effect of globalized industrial education strategies on the career prospects of African American missionaries. It identifies the restrictive policies applied to students and graduates from the three institutions that the Edmistons were affiliated with: Fisk University, Stillman Institute, and Tuskegee Institute. The chapter explains how the couple tried to adjust to new work expectations without either reducing their ministries to manual labor alone or falling victim to undisclosed moratoriums on African American international travel. It also shows how increased colonial demands for African laborers increased the pressure for African Americans to design a just alternative within the setting of the mission stations.

Implementing Historically Black Education Strategies at the Presbyterian Congo Mission, 1918–1919

This chapter details aspects of Fisk University, Stillman Institute, and Tuskegee Institute that Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston adapted for religious education from 1918 to 1919. It analyzes each missionary’s experiences at one of these campuses between 1892 and 1904 to show the academic roots of their perspectives on art, folklore, finance, local politics, and sustainable agriculture. Details of the consequences of colonial taxation and forced labor help explain why the Edmistons’ plans for the Luebo Agricultural College failed the following year. Descriptions of the student body suggest that the legacy of the college reflected its balance of classical and industrial education even when its agricultural goals went unmet.

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.

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The son of an enslaved woman named Jane, Washington did not know his father, who was probably white. After emancipation, Jane moved with her children to Malden, West Virginia, where her husband, Washington’s stepfather, was employed in the salt works. As a child, Washington worked in the salt furnaces and the coal mines. In 1872, he entered Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and later matriculated at Wayland Seminary. Washington became the founding leader of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881....

Booker T. Washington’s Multifaceted Program for Food Reform at the Tuskegee Institute

This chapter gives a case study of Booker T. Washington’s turn of the twentieth-century attempts to transform the African American diet. He micromanaged the dining plan for students and teachers at the Tuskegee Institute, advocating for their right to consume beef and wheat, high-status food items that served as symbols of Americanization. Washington also encouraged the cultivation of performatively middle-class food practices both for the benefit of observers intent on gauging the status of black acculturation as well as for the private benefit of his students, whose bodies he hoped these foods would benefit. Washington drew inspiration from white domestic scientists and the latest nutritional information of his day, but he subsumed the importance of following conventional dietary wisdom to the importance of black self-sufficiency.

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.