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COPYRIGHT 2005 Center For Black Music Research
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.
Eventually, these educators settled on a strategy for most African Americans and Native Americans, one that factored in both their allegedly lower mental capacities and their necessary future as compliant, cheap labor for farm and factory: vocational-industrial training. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing well into the 1920s, a steady stream of literature from prominent educationists and social theorists supported the notion of a comprehensive school system into which students were "tracked" into specialized academic, business, or industrial curricula based largely on their ethnic and economic backgrounds. (2) (Later, standardized intelligence or achievement tests were increasingly used as a "merit"-based aid to tracking.) Regardless of their track, all students would absorb the necessary American (i.e., white-Protestant-elite) values by sharing in a handful of school experiences open to everyone, such as assemblies, clubs, physical education, and social studies classes (Johnson 2000, 73-76).
The man who had pioneered this approach for "Negro education" was Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839-1893), child of missionaries to Hawaii and a commander of black Union troops in the Civil War. Basing his curricular ideals on contemporary racial theory, Armstrong envisioned a school environment in which academic learning would take place side-by-side with vocational training. This he saw as essential not only because most African Americans would presumably continue to live in the rural South, working with their hands, but also because he believed that physical labor "built character," which his charges appeared to lack. In 1868, on the banks of the Virginia peninsula bordering Norfolk and Newport News, he founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute as a reflection of his educational beliefs. Hampton's most famous early graduate, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), himself established a similar institution in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881. By the end of the century, the Tuskegee Institute was also drawing favorable nationwide attention from philanthropists, politicians, and journalists, attention based partly on Washington's considerable skills in public speaking and private negotiation.
Washington set the tone for the coming years in an eloquent if accommodating 1895 speech at the Atlanta Exposition. There, he proposed an arrangement in which African Americans would forego social equality with white Americans in exchange for economic opportunities appropriate to their situation. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" meshed nicely with the goals of vocational education, and it presented a course of action unlikely to alarm either white Southerners or Northern philanthropists. Because of the efforts of men like Thomas Jesse Jones (see the following section), those philanthropists had by now largely migrated to the Bookerite camp anyway. Moreover, white Southerners (and not a few Northern investors) desired above all else that the South's agrarian economy be sustained by a ready supply of capable yet docile Negro labor. Too much education, or the wrong sort, might jeopardize that prospect. Thus, a "Progressive" effort was gradually co-opted by forces that harbored far less genuine concern for the welfare of the black masses (Lewis 1993, 120-124).
Thomas Jesse Jones
Any balance that might have existed between academic and industrial studies at Hampton shifted irreversibly after the collapse of Reconstruction and especially after Armstrong's death in 1893. By 1918, Hampton would add fifteen buildings to its physical plant, triple its endowment, and raise enrollment by nearly three hundred students. Virtually all of this effort went toward enhancing vocational education (Peabody 1918, 242-251). Contributing to a renewed emphasis on manual training were the disappointments of Reconstruction and a continuing reluctance in the dominant culture to support college or professional education for blacks, which might have portended social equality. But the one person most responsible, if not for Hamptonism itself, then certainly for a broader American embrace of the Hampton philosophy, was Thomas Jesse Jones (1873-1950). A product of small-town Ohio and of Columbia University's Department of Sociology, Jones became one of the chief architects of tracked public education and an especially tireless and effective advocate for vocational education for African Americans and Native Americans. Following Morgan and his own mentor at Columbia, Franklin H. Giddings, Jones established a four-tier hierarchy of social classifications in which Anglo-Saxons fit the top category ("pleasure of thought") and all other "racial" groups were on lower rungs (e.g., "pleasure of physical activity" or "the instinctive response").
Jones began his teaching career at Hampton, where he became associate chaplain and economics instructor in 1902. Hampton Institute provided an ideal forum in Jones's lifelong campaign for the "special precautions" needed to develop appropriate curricula for "negroes and Indians" based on their "actual needs" (i.e., their future as reliable labor), their special learning styles, and their allegedly limited capacity for abstract thought. As Jones gradually worked his way into the corridors of power through his evangelism for industrial education, he came to be regarded as its outstanding authority. Beginning in 1916 with Negro Education, Jones authored a series of studies underwritten by various philanthropies and government agencies that firmly established his reputation. By the end of the 1920s, he had extended his influence into Europe, having through his books Education in Africa (Jones 1922) and Education in East Africa (Jones 1925) become one of the leading voices in the continuing dialogue over educational reform in the British, French, and Belgian colonies there (King 1971, 43-57).
Not every American intellectual and not every philanthropist agreed with Jones. Franz Boas (1911, 272), who would mentor Zora Neale Hurston and many other American cultural anthropologists, unstintingly and publicly refuted the claims of social-Darwinist racism throughout his lifetime, arguing that "the traits of the American Negro are adequately explained on the basis of his history and social status ... without falling back upon the theory of hereditary inferiority." Jones's severest African-American critic was undoubtedly W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Categorizing Negro Education as a "dangerous and in many respects unfortunate publication," Du Bois in 1918 devoted a lengthy essay in The Crisis to its manifold inconsistencies, prejudices, and self-serving arguments. Du Bois's chief objection was that "the whole trend of Mr. Jones' study and of his general recommendations is to make the higher training of Negroes practically difficult, if not impossible," but Du Bois noted the racism inherent in the emphasis on "decadent trades" (i.e., essentially menial occupations like carpentry, shoe repair, and blacksmithing) at the black trade schools and the unspeakable indignity of Jones's recommendations that black educators and their schools in the South come under increased "community" control--this in the very places where prejudice created conditions least favorable to blacks' receiving any sort of education whatsoever (Du Bois 1986, 868-878).
George Foster Peabody
It is more difficult to sort out George Foster Peabody's position in these matters. Formally, he was associated with many of the Bookerites through his philanthropic activities, and certainly, he regarded them as friends and allies. Like Jones, who had earned his bachelor's degree at Union Theological Seminary, Peabody saw his support of "Negro education" as rooted in Christian charity. (Peabody had continued his education as a young man at the Brooklyn YMCA Public Library and had first encountered his future business partner Spencer Trask through weekend involvements at the Reformed Church of Brooklyn Heights.) Yet Peabody's actions and statements during this period sometimes reveal an attitude toward African-American education that ran, if not exactly counter to the Jones-Washington party line, at least on a broader track. Peabody had already become known to his peers as a man who harbored more liberal views than many regarding education of African Americans. In a letter to J. H. Dillard, then president of the Negro Rural School Fund, he indicated that he understood and sympathized with Du Bois's point of view regarding Jones and the 1916 report (G. Peabody 1921). Peabody also clearly believed that R. Nathaniel Dett's "developed" spirituals and other compositions--clearly the fruit of "higher training of Negroes"--were as valuable for what they demonstrated regarding Negro potential as were "authentic" folk performances (the "unique Spirituals and melodies of the Negro race"), so often celebrated by whites for what they suggested about a so-called primitive people's innate religiosity. Considering that Peabody was a patron of the pioneering African ethnomusicologist N.G.J. Ballanta-Taylor (b. 1893) and was conversant with his complex cultural findings, it is probably a mistake to link Peabody's fascination with African music directly to the simplistic attachments of other white enthusiasts, which were often grounded in reductive racial categorization. (3)
In 1923, Peabody had also donated the then-princely sum of $25,000 for the installation of an organ--the "king" of Western musical instruments, long associated with the most complex and sacred works in the European canon--in Hampton's Ogden Hall. (This may have been a watershed moment in the efforts of Dett, and presumably a few others, to modernize the Hampton curriculum.)
In sponsoring a European tour by the Hampton Choir, Peabody appears to have had two related motives. One was to support a shift in overseas opinion, particularly in Great Britain, against the continuation of various forms of slavery in sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout the 1920s, distressing news continued to surface regarding the misconduct of various colonial administrations and especially the mining companies, plantation developers, and other economic interests associated with them. Although Britain had formally abolished the slave trade in 1807 and had emancipated all slaves in its colonies by 1838, forced labor remained a fact of daily life for many ordinary Africans. Throughout the 1920s, a renewed British Anti-Slavery Society fought for increased rights and protections for colonial laborers, slowly gaining ground through a series of small legislative victories that would become the foundation for international labor law (Grant 2005, 135-166). Peabody undoubtedly believed that the continuing ill-treatment of Africa's indigenous peoples stemmed in part from racist misperceptions. Surely, the vibrant example of the Hampton Choir would disabuse influential Europeans of the notion that Negroes could not be "civilized."
Peabody's other ostensible aim was to urge upon Europeans--again especially the British--a vocational-industrial model for African education similar to that used in the American South by Hampton and Tuskegee. There was nothing novel in this approach; indeed, various British educationists had been advocating a similar strategy since the mid--nineteenth century (King 1971, 43-54). But Thomas Jesse Jones's studies specifically linking the lessons...
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