Clinical Technique, Tacit Resistance: Progressive Education Experimentation in the Jim Crow South

Around 1940, the Southern Association Study in Secondary Schools and Colleges and the Secondary School Study of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes implemented cooperative educational experimentation in the American South. This was a progressive education method for improving schools exemplified in the national Eight-Year Study. The research detailed here reconstructs the work of the two southern studies as it occurred in tandem and in connection with the Eight-Year Study and the General Education Board. The white Southern Study utilized the progressive cooperative study as a clinical technique largely divorced from democratic ideals. The black Secondary School Study leveraged the progressive cooperative study as a means to democratize African American education in the South. The findings reported here confirm and complement conclusions in the historiography of African American education, extend historical perspectives on the Eight-Year Study, and contribute to an understanding of how progressive education was interpreted and translated into practice.

Undermining Leadership Effectiveness

This chapter highlights the tactics used by faculty, students, and administrators to undermine the leadership of a minority female hired from a national search to chair an academic department of all-White faculty. The tactics ranged from lack of support from her immediate supervisor to collusion to re-assign this minority female to a lesser position. She also received biased evaluations from faculty and students. This faculty member was able to persevere through self-confidence, through refusing to be intimidated, and through her ability to turn challenges into opportunities to showcase her strength and determination to prevail. At one point, she filed a discrimination complaint. As part of her legacy, she established an annual scholarship in her name for African American education majors matriculating at the institution.

U.S. Empire and the “Adaptive Education” Model: The Global Production of Race

Following World War I, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a large-scale commercial philanthropic endeavor called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. They specifically promoted the “adaptive education” model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor, Christian character formation, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. They relied upon the sociologist and educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, Thomas Jesse Jones, to advocate for the transnational development of the model. Juxtaposing Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model in Education in Africa and W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model in The Crisis and Darkwater, the author finds that two different conceptions of the U.S. racial state emerge. According to Jones and Du Bois, why did the U.S. racial state decide to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention? Furthermore, can this dynamic be conceptualized within a theory of race that conceptualizes the U.S. racial state as a nation-state?