Chapter 14 Philanthropy and Self Help

p. 293-325

end of Reconstruction brought little improvement in the economic and social status of blacks

• political gains disappeared
• question one: improved status only in education
• southerners objected to black schools
• southerners tolerated black schools more than other kinds of black institutions
• philanthropy supported educational institutions
• Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal church had broadened its scope
• Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Cathiolic-major black denominations
• wealthy Americans subsidized black learning in the South
• 260 new institutions of higher learning!
• Vanderbilt(1873)
• Johns Hopkins (1876)
• Leland Stanford (1885)
• University of Chicago (1892)
• educational foundations were founded: the Peabody education fund
• the John F. Slater Fund, the General Education Board, the Anna Jeanes Fund, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the Phelps-Stokes Fund.
• religious groups gave a lot more than secular foundations
• George Peabody, amassed a fortune as a merchant and financier in England and America, created an education fund for public schools in the South
• John Slater, textile industrialist from Norwich, Connecticut funded teacher training
• John Rockefeller gave a lot to Baptist schools and funded the University of Chicago
• Anna Jeanes, gave 200,000 to General Education Board to improve black rural schools
• Julius Rosenwald sat on the board of the Tuskegee Institute
• agencies wished to promote self-help for the individual
• Dexter Hawkins, New York lawyer argued the South should be educated to bring a larger tax base to the nation
• large foundations: Robert Ogden, H. H. Roers, Collis Huntington, Andrew Carnegie, William H. Baldwin, Jr., and George Foster Peabody
• public education was greatly improved
• money for white children was $6:2.27, $22.25:2, dramatically more funding for whites
• Jubilee Singers of Fisk University brought money to their institution through concert performances in the North
• 1900: 28,00 black teachers, 1.5 million black students
• black state schools: Virginia, Arkansas, Georgia, Delaware
• many whites believed blacks should receive a limited education
• Booker T. Washington attended Hampton Institute and received a practical education from Samuel Chapman Armstrong
• emphasized the value of acquiring land andhomes, vocations and skills.
• Washington believed blacks must do useful service to achieve recognition
• students created the buildings of Tuskegee, produced and cooked the food, etc.
• Washington was an apostle for industrial education that would not antagonize the white South and would carve out a place for blacks in communities
• it trained blacks to become farmers, mechanics, and domestic servents 
• Northern education prompted blacks to demand equality!
• Washington encouraged blacks to manage farms intelligently own land, act thriftily, be patient, be perserverent, adopt high morals and good manners
• Washington regarded science, mathematics, and history as impractical
• The Washington doctrine of industrial/vocational education for the great mass of blacks was hailed by whites in the North and in the South
• some critics denounced Washington's program as "education for the new slavery"
•  White Southerners liked Washington's relative disinterest in the political and civil rights for blacks
• Washington's program would consign blacks to an inferior economic and social status in Southern life
• "breaches": 1) spoke out against racial prejudice in Chicago-"prejudice was eating away at the vitals of the South," 2) met Teddy Roosevelt for lunch "a breach of racial etiquette."
• Washington believed that African Americans starting withso little would have to work up gradually before they could attain a position of power and respectibility.
• a relatively small group of blacks took serious exception to Washington's point of view
• W. E. B. Dubois, a youth African American who was trained at Fisk, Harvard (Dr. of Philosophy), and Berlin(German lectures...)
• Du Bois was born in Massachusetts, taught at Atlanta University
• Souls of Black Folk, criticitized Washington's "gospel of work and money"
• wrote like Thoreau
• Du Bois did not approve of the manner in which Washington publicly ignored or winked at the white South's virtual destruction of the political and civil status of African Americans
• p. 305