Representing America, instructing Europe: the Hampton choir tours Europe.

This is a story about a choir trip. It might seem to offer little of historical significance: we have all been taught that real history is made up by the gradual accretion of data from which, atom by atom, year by year, meaningful patterns eventually emerge--and those more by accident than by design. Yet there is sometimes unexpected value lurking in a seemingly random artifact, a slightly paradoxical series of events, that is not explained as easily via the usual paradigms. Such moments demand more of us. If we read them thoughtfully enough, we may recover the meaning of even the most trivial human actions, surprisingly rich with desire, deceit, and occasional courage, and "history" will surface.

One such story revolves around the 1930 European tour of the Hampton Institute Choir. Financed largely by American philanthropic interests, it was meant to demonstrate to influential Europeans that the educational model established for African Americans at the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes would also serve well in African colonial schools. Its sponsors, especially the Hampton Institute and interested parties that included George Foster Peabody, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Thomas Jesse Jones, hoped that news of the tour would echo to their advantage in the United States, too. Central to nearly everyone's vision of the tour was the continuing special power of black spirituals, seen as the heart of the choir's repertoire. Yet the significance of those spirituals as emblems of African-American--and American--cultural identity was then in flux, as were power relations between white philanthropists, white educationists, and black students and faculty at places like Hampton. As a result, a close reading of events surrounding the Hampton Choir's tour can offer a remarkably detailed snapshot of the United States' continuing conversation about race, education, and national identity, circa 1930.

Peabody and "Negro Education"

Sometime in 1928 or earlier, George Foster Peabody (1852-1938), eminent American financier and philanthropist, began to promote the idea of sending members of the Hampton Institute Choir, or possibly the entire group, to Europe for a series of performances. A letter from Peabody to R. Nathaniel Dett makes clear that Peabody had been discussing such a tour for at least six months (Peabody 1929a). Peabody had long concerned himself with education in general and Southern education in particular; spectacular success as an investment banker (for Thomas Edison, rail lines, mining) had allowed him to retire in 1906, at the age of 54, and to devote himself entirely to various causes. At one point or another, he was an active trustee on the board of every important institution for Negro education in the South, and many other schools as well. In addition, he served as treasurer of three significant philanthropic organizations: the Southern Education Board, organized by Robert C. Ogden, the General Education Board, sponsored by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and the Negro Rural School Fund (Ware 1958). Peabody knew everyone intimately involved in the support and administration of schools like Hampton; many of his peers were similarly committed, and in some cases their families had been involved for two or three generations. (1)

Today, it is all too easy to criticize the efforts of those who, like Peabody, cast themselves as leaders in the movement for "Negro education" early in the twentieth century. Virtually every major philanthropic and educational institution embraced that era's racialized educational philosophies and based their policies on them. Faced with the need to school an African-American population only two generations removed from slavery, along with the largest influx of immigrants in the nation's history, Progressive Era educators questioned whether the old ideal of a common secondary curriculum was still realistic. Would the traditional series of high-school courses, heavy on history and the humanities, effectively prepare these populations for their roles as citizens and (more to the point) as workers?

Central to the discussion was an ideology based on cultural categories inherited from German social scientists, many of whom formulated convenient rationales for their existing prejudice by refiguring theories from the emerging field of evolutionary biology. Such social Darwinism encouraged Americans--already prone to embrace a notion of their manifest destiny in world affairs--toward more general beliefs in Aryan supremacy. Thus, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), often considered the father of American anthropology, divided the world's people into three stages of evolutionary progress: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Morgan grouped Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and tribal Africans with the "savages," generously termed the more urbanized peoples of India and China "upper barbarians," and--unsurprisingly--found Anglo-Saxons the most "civilized" (Johnson 2000, 71-72).

Yet, as this ideology matured, younger scholars and educators ushered in the Progressive Era in part by arguing that "savage" and "barbarian" peoples were not entirely beyond redemption. If they somehow learned to emulate their northern European and Anglo-American betters, they too could evolve toward "civilization." (In the long meantime, they would have to accept the leadership of whites.) While rejecting the most rigidly deterministic paradigms of Morgan's crowd, the new generation continued to theorize within a three-stage evolutionary framework and, based on that, to seek specialized educational solutions to the problems posed by America's unwashed masses.