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Northern Foundations and the Shaping of Southern Black Rural Education, 1902–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

James D. Anderson
James D. Anderson*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois (Urbana)
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Extract

Northern Philanthropists and Their Interest in Black Rural Education

During the first two decades of the twentieth century an educational awakening stirred the American South. Stimulated by Northern philanthropists and their Southern agents, the region experienced a remarkable expansion of its public educational system. In many states laws were changed to strengthen the constitutional basis of public education. The value of schoolhouses increased, illiteracy rapidly decreased, local taxes multiplied, school terms were extended, and teachers' salaries increased considerably. Historians generally view this organized school campaign as the official launching of the Southern education movement. To be sure, white missionaries and black leaders had campaigned for universal education in the South since the Reconstruction era, but in the dawn of the twentieth century white Southerners made their first vigorous, large-scale efforts to improve the region's schools. The success of the Southern education movement was a result of the combined efforts of industrial philanthropists and Southern white educators. These two groups formed a powerful new force in the struggle to determine the purpose of Southern education for both whites and blacks. The alliance between Northern businessmen-philanthropists and Southern white school officials was ratified by the creation of two major educational organizations, the Southern Education Board in 1901 and the General Education Board in 1902. The policies and programs formed by these boards profoundly shaped Southern black public education during the first half of the twentieth century.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , Winter 1978 , pp. 371 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1 Harlan, Louis, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States 1901–1915 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1958, [1968 Atheneum edition]), p. 79; Dabney, Charles W., Universal Education in the South, Vol. II (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1936); Knight, Edgar W., Public Education in the South (New York, 1922), p. 433; Vann Woodward, C., Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951, [1974 edition]), pp. 395–400.Google Scholar

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37 Slater Fund, John F., Suggested Course for County Training Schools (Lynchburg, Virginia, 1917).Google Scholar

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39 Wilkerson, Doxey A., Special Problems of Negro Education, United States Advisory Committee on Education, Staff Study Number 12 (Washington, D.C. 1939), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

40 Redcay, , County Training Schools, pp. 78–84. 100.Google Scholar

41 Enck, Henry Snyder, “The Buden Borne: Northern White Philanthropy and Southern Black Industrial Education, 1900–1915” (University of Cincinnati, Ph.D. dissertation, 1970), see chapter 4 on “Philanthropic Motivation”; Dillard, James H., Rose, Wickliffe and Fosdick, Raymond to Members of the General Education Board (October 6, 1922), Box 331, GEB Papers, p. 24.Google Scholar