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

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-103
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Historically Black ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
Tuskegee Institute ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
Agricultural College

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.

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

2020 ◽  
pp. 47-76
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
New Work ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Tuskegee Institute ◽  
Fisk University

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.

Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-104
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Vocational Education ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
National Network ◽  
Gainful Employment ◽  
The North ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 3 focuses on Walker’s gift of education through her national network of beauty schools as a model of urban industrial vocational education at the same time that Booker T. Washington’s southern rural model of industrial education was prominent. Washington’s Tuskegee model has been critiqued as not successful in addressing black educational needs despite its proliferation because it appeased the white South and focused on the fading agricultural economy. Walker’s beauty schools, in contrast, offered an urban alternative for migrating black women to earn credentials, enabling their gainful employment in the emerging industrial economies of the North, Midwest, and South. The chapter analyzes the curriculum of the Walker beauty schools and its blending of theory, technique, and business management principles to support graduates’ success. This gift of education aligned Walker with other educator-philanthropists of her era, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Lucy Laney, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown—whose schools she also funded. Walker’s partnership with southern black schools is also examined through which she made donations in exchange for commitments to offer her curriculum. Although only a few colleges took up the offer, participating schools split profits of beauty culture sales made by students with the Walker Company. The program was Walker’s effort to grow her market, extend opportunity to students, and financially support the schools. The chapter reinterprets the relationship between industrial philanthropy and black education, and the value of industrial vocational education to northern black urban communities.

Public-Private Symbiosis in Nashville Special Education

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherman Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Private School ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Public Funds ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public

The conventional historiography describing a strict public-private divide in United States schooling is misleading. The standard story claims that public schooling was a fuzzy concept 200 years ago; the division between public and private education for children thus developed largely over the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, public funds went to many private schools and even large private systems, such as the New York Public School Society. In some instances, public funds went to parochial education, either explicitly or as part of an arrangement to allow for diverse religious instruction using public funds. However, the nineteenth century witnessed growing division between public and private, largely excluding religious education (or at least non-Protestant religious education). By the end of the nineteenth century, the standard educational historiography suggests, public schools meant public in several senses: funded from the public coffers, open to the public in general, and controlled by a public, democratically controlled process. Tacit in that definition was a relatively rigid dividing line between public and private school organizations. Historians know that this implicit definition of “public” omits key facts. First, the governance of public schools became less tied to electoral politics during the Progressive Era. Public schooling in nineteenth-century cities generally meant large school boards, intimately connected with urban political machines. By the 1920s, many city school systems had smaller boards in a more corporate-like structure. The consolidation of small rural school districts in the first half of the twentieth century completed this removal of school governance from more local politics. A second problem with the definition above is unequal access to quality education (however defined). Historically, the acceptance of all students was true only in a limited sense, either in access to schools at all (with the exclusion of many children with disabilities) or, more generally, to the resources and curriculum involved in the best public schooling of the early twentieth century (as with racial segregation).

Measuring Diversity at a Historically Black College of Dentistry

2011 ◽  
pp. 212-227
Author(s):  
Garnett Lee Henley ◽  
Wanda Lawrence ◽  
Candace Mitchell ◽  
Donna Henley-Jackson ◽  
Tawana Feimster
Keyword(s):  
Historically Black ◽  
White Students ◽  
Hispanic Students ◽  
Black College ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Historically Black College ◽  
Medical College ◽  
Measuring Diversity ◽  
Dental Schools ◽  
Diversity Studies

There are several excellent indices available to quantify diversity within a student body. Richness and evenness can be studied using Simpson’s Index with its associated Reciprocal Index, and with Shannon-Weiner’s Index “H” and Index “E”. Lieberson provides the means to measure isolation and interaction, and Dissimilarity works well to identify segregated communities. Results using these indices show that the Historically Black College of Dentistry is a culturally vibrant and diverse academic and social environment. White students at the Historically Black College of Dentistry are more likely to enjoy interaction with other Whites than will Historically Black and Hispanic students at all other dental schools, except at the other Medical College, the only other HBCU with a dental school. Overall, there was no statistical diversity difference between the Historically Black College of Dentistry and all other dental schools over the 10 year study period. Statistically significant correlations between each index provided a framework for using each index in prediction modeling. Recent methods to manage multi-collinearity, such as extracting unstandardized residuals to use as adjusted coefficients add promise that all indices can be used in future diversity studies.

A Higher Mission

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Tuskegee Institute ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
The American South ◽  
European Colonialism

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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Historically Black ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Church History ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Mission Work ◽  
Protestant Denominations

The introduction explains how analysis of the mission work performed by Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston contributes to studies of historically black education, American Protestant church history, southern history, colonialism, and the African diaspora. It states how the activities of these two ministers added nuance to two major controversies in their lifetimes: the development of race-specific pedagogy and the expansion of segregation among many American Protestant denominations. The source material used to analyze the Edmistons and the American Presbyterian Congo Mission is introduced in comparison with scholarly perspectives on how African villagers and students also shaped mission policies.

Industrial Education and Symbolic Home Building in the Congo Free State, 1898–1907

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
Home Building ◽  
Classical Training ◽  
Congo Free State ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
Black Missionaries

Chapter 1 explains trends in the African American Protestant missions movement up to 1907 with a focus on William Henry Sheppard and the black staff of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission. The literary and musical accomplishments of Althea Brown are introduced in the context of her classical training at Fisk University. The role that Alonzo Edmiston played in developing industrial education at the Congo Mission is introduced through his childhood working on a Tennessee plantation and his education at Stillman Institute. The final section explains how both ministers applied their academic backgrounds and the lessons of previous black missionaries to rebuilding a mission station despite political turmoil in the region.

Training “Leaders of Their Own Race”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah H. Case
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Board Members ◽  
Academic Education ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
Ideological Assumptions

Through a focus on Spelman Seminary of Atlanta, Georgia, between its founding in 1881 and the 1920s, this chapter analyzes the ideological assumptions behind, and the content of, education for black female respectability. An analysis of the content of the education offered at Spelman and the goals of administrators, board members, faculty, and supporters provides an understanding of how secondary schools for girls taught the attributes of respectability. To a surprising degree, industrial education was viewed as essential to the curriculum of a school for “striving” black young women. In contrast to traditional interpretations of black education that oppose industrial and academic education, Spelman faculty and associates viewed industrial and academic education as mutually reinforcing.

“Forty Acres and a Mule”: Horace Mann Bond and the Lynching of Jerome Wilson

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
ADAM FAIRCLOUGH
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Early Years ◽  
University President ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
The Core ◽  
Distinguished Career ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Man

In 1934 Horace Mann Bond, an African American, was in the early years of a distinguished career as an historian and university president when the lynching of a young black man, Jerome Wilson, impinged on his life, shaking him to the core. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education had taken him to a small community near Franklinton, in Washington Parish, Louisiana, where the lynching took place. Bond knew the victim's family, and he wrote an account of the lynching that traced the history of the Wilson family from the days of slavery.

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

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Industrial Education ◽  
Hampton Institute ◽  
Tuskegee Institute ◽  
White American

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document