¹ Woodson, Carter G., “The Miseducation of the Negro,” Crisis 38, no. 8 (August 1931): 266–67.Google Scholar

² Ibid., 267.Google Scholar

³ Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo, The Early Black History Movement Carter G. Woodson and Lorenzo Johnston Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 4.Google Scholar

⁴ “Central work”: quoted in Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (New York: Verso, 1998), 50. See Asante, Molefi K., An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), 78; and Fairclough, Adam, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 20–21. On Afrocentrism, see Howe, , Afrocentrism; Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Marable, Manning, ed., Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Part Three (Afrocentricity and Its Critics); and Moses, Wilson J., Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

⁵ In 1975, Goodenow, Ronald K. wrote in this journal that “the response and contribution of blacks… to progressive education has received little attention from scholars.” He was even more emphatic in a 1978 essay for Phylon, declaring that “historians of progressivism have totally ignored… black progressives.” In spite of Goodenow's path-breaking articles about progressive education and race, “black progressives” are scarcely more visible today than they were forty years ago. While Goodenow focused mainly on how white progressive educators viewed race and the education of blacks, he advanced two important arguments about black educators: first, that they demonstrated a widespread and sustained interest in progressivism during the 1930s. And second, that many black educators viewed progressive education as a promising avenue to “democratic social change.” Goodenow identified the following African-American individuals as exemplary progressive educators: Senior Specialist in the Education of Negroes at the U.S. Office of Education, Ambrose Caliver; sociologist Charles S. Johnson; philosopher Alain Locke; and editor of the Journal of Negro Education, Charles H. Thompson. See Ronald Goodenow, “The Progressive Educator, Race and Ethnicity in the Depression Years: An Overview,” History of Education Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 365–94; Goodenow, “Paradox in Progressive Educational Reform: The South and the Education of Blacks in the Depression Years,” Phylom 39 (1st Qtr. 1978): 60; and “The Southern Progressive Educator on Race and Pluralism: The Case of William Heard Kilpatrick,” History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 147–70.Google Scholar

⁶ The literature on progressive education is voluminous—the following citations comprise only a sample of the highlights: Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961); Cuban, Larry, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1880–1990 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993); Graham, Patricia A., Progressive Education from Arcady to Academe: A History of the Progressive Education Association, 1919–1955 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967); Kliebard, Herbert M., The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Mirel, Jeffrey, “Old Educational Ideas, New American Schools: Progressivism and the Rhetoric of Educational Revolution,” Paedogogica Historica 39, no. 4 (August 2003): 477–97; Ravitch, Diane, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Touchstone, 2000); Reese, William J., “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (March 2001): 1–24; Tyack, David, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Google Scholar

⁷ Alridge, Derrick P. and Chennault, Ronald E. are two of the only scholars whose work has directly challenged this implicit color coding of progressive education as white. For a cogent discussion of how the discourse of “progressivism” fit into the thinking of two pioneering African-American educators, see Alridge, “Of Victorianism, Civilizationism and Progressivism: The Educational Ideas of Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois, 1892–1940,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 4 (November 2007): 416–46. On the case for considering Washington, Booker T. a “progressivist,” see Ronald Chennault, “Pragmatism and Progressivism in the Educational Thought and Practices of Booker T. Washington,” Philosophical Studies in Education 44 (January 2013): 121–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ See, for example, Cremin, , Transformation of the School; Kliebard, Struggle for the American Curriculum; and Ravitch, Left Back. Google Scholar

⁹ Cremin, , Transformation of the School, 230.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Here I am reiving on Mirel's definition of the “key elements of progressive education.” See “Old Educational Ideas,” esp. 496. On the difficulty of defining progressive education, see Sol Cohen, , Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Lang, Peter, 1999), ch.5 (The Influence of Progressive Education on School Reform in the United States: Redescriptions); Mirel, , “Old Educational Ideas”; and the Afterword (The Search for Meaning in Progressive Education) in Kliebard, , Struggle for the American Curriculum. Google Scholar

¹¹ Here I am relying on Ravitch. See Left Back, ch. 6 (On the Social Frontier).Google Scholar

¹² This was the heading of a section of Miseducation. On missionary education, see Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Watkins, William H., The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); and Wolters, Raymond, The New Negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

¹³ Locke, Alain, “Educational Aspects of the American Negro,” circa 1925, Alain Locke Papers, Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, box 164–13, folder 18, 1.Google Scholar

¹⁴ “Keep pace”: Mirel, “Old Educational Ideas,” 481; “listening regime”: Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker, Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education (1928; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969), frontispiece; “a revolution”: John Dewey, The School and Society (1900; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 34.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Quotes, in Wolters, , The New Negro on Campus, 91, 83.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Locke, Alain, “Negro Education Bids for Par” (1925), repr. in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 248. While the better white colleges increasingly concentrated on secular scholarship, a conspicuous tradition of piety persisted at black colleges. In a 1920 survey of 38 private black colleges and universities, all of them, without exception, required daily chapel attendance. Ninety percent of the brochures sent to prospective students from these same colleges and universities emphasized chapel as one of their rigid requirements and in four of five of these institutions chapel attendance was officially recorded. David Henry Sims, “Religious Education in Negro Colleges and Universities,” Journal of Negro History 5 (April 1920): 181.Google Scholar

¹⁷ “Spirit”: Woodson, , Miseducation, 18; Woodson to Jesse Moorland, 22 May 1920, Jesse Moorland Papers, Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, box 126–34, folder 695.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Franklin, John Hope and Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), 419.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Appiah, Anthony and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., eds, Civil Rights: An A to Z Reference of the Movement that Changed America (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2004), 187.Google Scholar

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²² Goggin, Jacqueline, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 93–94, 108, 111–12.Google Scholar

²³ “Making a thoughtful”: quoted in “Additional Notices of The Miseducation of the Negro,” Journal of Negro History 18 (My 1933): 347.Google Scholar

²⁴ On Woodson's work in the Philippines, see Goggin, Carter G. Woodson, ch. 1.Google Scholar

²⁵ Woodson, Miseducation, 74–75.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid., 9. “[W]e must bear in mind,” Woodson wrote, “that the Negro has never been educated. He has merely been informed about other things which he has not been permitted to do” (Miseducation, 71).Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid., 8, 77.Google Scholar

²⁸ This dilemma reflects a broader tension within progressive educational philosophy, which Diane Ravitch describes as follows: “Were they [schools] supposed to prepare children to fit in to present-day society? [Or] [w]ere they supposed to change society and teach children to criticize the status quo?” Ravitch, Left Back, 203. With respect to how the “needs” of African-American students in the Crow, Jim South were often equated with the requirements of a racially stratified economy, see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 222–26.Google Scholar

²⁹ Woodson, , Miseducation, 23, 19, 8.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ibid., 5; Carter G. Woodson, “Has Educating the Negro Made Him a Liability?,” New York Amsterdam News, 18 May 1932.Google Scholar

³¹ Woodson, “The Director Speaks,” Journal of Negro History 16 (July 1931): 345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Woodson, , Miseducation, 5, 8.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., 5, 15–16.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ibid., 30.Google Scholar

³⁵ Woodson, , “Teachers Accept Assignment”; Ben Azikiwe, “By Midnight Oil,” Philadelphia Tribune, 13 April 1933.Google Scholar

³⁶ Woodson, , Miseducation, 62. In an article entitled “Why We Should Publish Truth in Self-Defense,” Woodson lamented the fact that “[a]lmost every year we note the publication of some book which misrepresents the status of the Negro and makes it necessary for scientifically trained persons to write a dozen or more books to counteract the disastrous effect of that particular misrepresentation.” Woodson, New York Amsterdam News, 9 November 1932.Google Scholar

³⁷ Woodson, , Miseducation, 62. Google Scholar

³⁸ Ibid., 75, 68.Google Scholar

³⁹ According to Fairclough, Woodson's Afrocentric curriculum neglected at great cost the supposed fact that “[w]hen it came to literacy and other academic skills, European models were the only ones available.” Fairclough, Class of Their Own, 21; see also 332.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Woodson, , Miseducation, 75, 67.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 68.Google Scholar

⁴² On how history should be taught in the schools, according to the progressive historians, see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 7 (Professionalism Stalled); and Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 7 (Contesting the Retreat from the Schools: Progressives and Teachers Before World War II).Google Scholar

⁴³ On Dewey's commitment to social history, see Fallace, Thomas D., Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895–1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 36–39.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Beard, Charles, “The Trend in Social Studies,” Historical Outlook 20 (December, 1929): 370; Counts, George S., The Social Foundations of Education (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), 550; Woodson, , Miseducation, 75. On Woodson and social history, see Fitzpatrick, Ellen, History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Jardins, Julie Des, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). “The hidden lives of the poor, the oppressed, and the disenfranchised”: Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 267.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Rugg, Harold, “How Shall We Reconstruct the Social Studies Curriculum?,” Historical Outlook 12 (May 1921): 185; Woodson, , Miseducation, 69, 68.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Rugg, , “How Shall We Reconstruct,” 189; Woodson, Miseducation, 68–69.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Beard, Charles, “The Task Before Us,” Social Studies 25 (May 1934): 217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁵⁰ “Building”: Kilpatrick, William Heard et al., The Educational Frontier (1933; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969), 193.Google Scholar

⁵¹ The Editorial Board, “Teachers and the Class Struggle,” in The Social Frontier: A Critical Reader, ed. Provenzo, Eugene F., Jr. (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 133. Originally published in Social Frontier 2 (1935).Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ “Our minds,” Woodson said, “must become sufficiently developed to use segregation to kill segregation” (Miseducation, 54).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Ibid., 90. He also predicted that radical groups seemingly friendly to the Negro cause would “drop him” as soon as their own short-term goals had been achieved (ibid., 91).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Azikiwe, , “By Midnight Oil.”Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Pero Gaglo Dagbovie argues cogently that Woodson should be regarded as the progenitor of an iconoclastic tradition of African American scholars who indicted their black bourgeoisie colleagues for separating themselves “from black culture and the struggles of the masses,” 65. Dagbovie places Frazier's, E. Franklin Black Bourgeoisie (1957) in this tradition. See Dagbovie, , The Early Black History Movement, ch. 3 (The Progenitor of a Twentieth-Century African American Iconoclastic Tradition).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Ravitch, , Left Back, 203–4.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ “[W]e can see injustice, crime and misery in their most terrible forms all about us,” Counts said, “and, if we are not directly affected, register the emotions of a scientist studying white rats in a laboratory.” Counts, George S., Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (1932; repr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 19, 20.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Woodson, , Miseducation, 79, 53.Google Scholar

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⁶³ Mirel, , “Old Educational Ideas,” 477. See, esp., Cuban, , How Teachers Taught; David Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 151–54; and Zilversmit, Arthur, Changing Schools. Google Scholar

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⁶⁵ Duckett, L. A., “A Method for Studying Negro Contributions to Progress,” Negro History Bulletin 2 (October 1938): 3.Google Scholar

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⁶⁷ Ibid.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ “Little support”: Ravitch, Left Back, 232.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Alridge, , “Of Victorianism, Civilizationism and Progressivism”; Ronald Butchart, “‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World': A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,” History of Education Quarterly 28 (Autumn 1988): 333–66; and Gaither, Milton, American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), 109–20. “Fit the realities”: Alridge, 417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷¹ He makes a glancing reference to Dewey in Miseducation; see p. 78.Google Scholar

⁷² See Whiting, Helen Adele, “Negro Children Study Race Culture,” Progressive Education 12 (March 1935): 172–81.Google Scholar

⁷³ Summing up progressive education's stance on race during the Great Depression, Goodenow writes: “In its stress on tolerance there is little evidence of interest in actual race relations or careful study of the place of race and ethnicity in the American social fabric” (“The Progressive Educator, Race and Ethnicity in the Depression Years,” 382). For an extended discussion of the role race played in Dewey's educational philosophy, see Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race; for a discussion of Kilpatrick's views about race, see Goodenow, “The Southern Progressive Educator on Race and Pluralism.”Google Scholar

⁷⁴ According to Ravitch, the most significant unresolved tension in progressive education in the wake of the Great Depression was that between progressive ideas about pedagogy and progressive ideas about “social reconstruction.” “Progressive education always contained complex currents under its broad umbrella,” Ravitch writes, “but none so dissonant as the simultaneous calls for child-centered schools and schools that would reform society” (Left Back, 202–3). The example of the Association, however, shows that pedagogical progressivism and social reform progressivism were not always in conflict.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Woodson, Miseducation, 51. As incisive chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance George Hutchinson argues, when we study the Jim Crow era, it is not uncommon for us to make false or misleading “distinctions between black and white identities,” using logic that implicitly follows that of the color line. George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar