African American Education in Virginia During the Jim Crow Era

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Jim Crow laws[1]

                According to C. Vann Woodard, the origin of the term “Jim Crow” as applied to segregationist measures against African Americans is “lost in obscurity.”  He notes, “Thomas D. Rice wrote a song and dance called ‘Jim Crow’ in 1832, and the term had become an adjective by 1838.  The first example of ‘Jim Crow law’ listed by the Dictionary of American English is dated 1904.  But the expression was used by writers in the 1890s…”[2]  Jim Crow laws were initiated by white politicians in the South to circumscribe black voting rights and to exclude them from participation in various social arenas which would have to be shared with white people; the net result was a social system of separation of the white and non-white “races” in the South.  Historians continue to debate the timing and extent of de jure segregation (separation by law), and the impetus behind this phenomenon.  But generally speaking, separation of the races by custom or law was becoming increasingly apparent in the 1880s.  Though most African Americans were forced by violence or the threat of it to acquiesce in this racial proscription, there was never a time between the 1880s and the 1950s when this system was not being challenged by someone somewhere, either individually or in groups, in the courts or by means of informal protests.  Booker T. Washington, himself a proponent of “vocational” education and one who believed in establishing economic security before demanding civil and voting rights, was in fact secretly funding legal challenges to segregation in the early 20th century, using Northern philanthropists’ money for the cause.

[1] See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955); Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South (1980); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992).

 

[2] C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Third Revised Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), n7.

Plessy v. Ferguson[1]

                There are few known details about Homer Plessy, the young man who challenged the constitutionality a Louisiana law required railroad companies to segregate whites and blacks on trains in the state.  The court records tell us that he was “seven-eighths Caucasian,” which may have been why he was chosen by the group of people who were engaged in battling the Louisiana segregation law through the courts.  The railroad was sympathetic to their cause, for providing extra cars for African American travelers was costly and a nuisance.  On June 7, 1892, Plessy boarded a train in New Orleans and took a seat in a car reserved for whites. When he refused to move after the conductor asked him to, he was duly arrested by a detective who was standing by for the occasion.  A local judge (John H. Ferguson) ruled against Plessy’s argument that the law violated his rights, and Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court.  Four years later (1896), the Court decided against Plessy in a 7 to 1 decision, with Justice John Marshall Harlan as the sole dissenter.  The Court maintained that a separate car did not violate Plessy’s civil rights because he could still travel on the railway, and that there was no evidence that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of interiority.”  After Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread swiftly throughout the South, and signs saying “Whites Only” or “Colored” appeared on entrances and exits, rest rooms and water fountains, waiting rooms, and elevators.  Even telephones in the new state of Oklahoma were segregated, the legislature requiring separate booths for blacks and whites.

[1] See Robert A. Divine, T.H. Breen et al, America, Past and Present: From 1865 (Fifth Edition) (New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 594-595.

 

The Washington – DuBois controversy in re: black education[1]

                What or manner of education the former slaves should receive became a matter of controversy by the end of the nineteenth century.  Many white people, especially Southerners thinking of their need for an agricultural labor force, thought that a rudimentary knowledge of “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” was sufficient and that former slaves should be taught useful, practical skills in farming and the industrial arts.  They believed that so-called “vocational schools” could best serve the interests of both whites and blacks in the South.  An important black leader of the post-Civil War period, Booker T. Washington, agreed in general with this approach.  He founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a black vocational school, and cooperated with Northern philanthropists in securing funds for similar schools throughout the South.  Washington pleased the white southern community by assuring them that African Americans had no desire for social equality with whites, but simply for economic security.  He was initially lauded as a significant race leader by a young, Harvard-educated teacher at Atlanta University, but within a few short years this younger man – W.E.B. DuBois – was in public disagreement with Washington’s educational philosophy.  His Souls of Black Folk  1903) was the first venue in which he attacked Washington’s vocational school philosophy as short-sighted and capitulating to white racism.  He argued that black people should aspire to a liberal arts education which would enable them to work for their civil rights in the here-and-now, not some theoretical future when whites would be more willing to accommodate them.  Washington’s Tuskegee Institute continued to flourish, even after his death in 1915, but DuBois and several like-minded whites and African Americans spearheaded the movement for a vehicle more conducive to black advancement, founding the N.A.A.C.P. in the first decade of the twentieth century.

 

Black education in the Jim Crow South[2]

                Upon emancipation, many former slaves were anxious to put themselves beyond the control of their former white masters.  They moved away from “home” plantations to seek work elsewhere; moved out of the white Christian churches to congregate in all-black institutions, and often felt that their children would be best educated in all-black schools taught by African American teachers.  The sad irony of this latter situation is that when white southerners were again in control of local political institutions at the end of Reconstruction, they enshrined this practice of separate schools in law, but did not fund the black schools to anywhere near the extent of the white schools.  Black educational opportunities thus suffered, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the local community.

 

                African American parents were convinced of the importance of education for enabling their children to have a better life than the life they themselves led.  Many poor sharecroppers and farmers in the South cooperated with Northern philanthropists such as Julius Rosenwald to contribute their efforts to building schools in rural areas:  they often supplied the labor while the Rosenwald Fund supplied the materials.  Black teachers enjoyed a significant amount of freedom in speech and action inside the classroom, but black principals faced the double-edged sword of white patronage:  whites were often supportive of local black schools but if a local planter wanted, for example, a place in a certain school for the untrained daughter of one of his domestic workers, it was well-nigh impossible to refuse.


[1] See Louis A. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee (1983); W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a race, 1868-1919 (1993).

 

[2] See James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (1988); Adam Fairclough, “’Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro … Seems … Tragic’:  Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 87, 1 (June 2000): 65-91.

 

This lesson was created by Tom Fallace, University of Virginia. The background essays were written  by Risa Anne Ryland, University of Virginia.