Chapter 3: “No Shirking, No Sulking”: Black Teachers and Racial Uplift After the Civil War
Over the next ten weeks, I will be walking through Dana Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession chapter-by-chapter. My hope is that this level of engagement with her work will help me better ingrain the history and key themes of American education and perhaps be helpful to you as well.
The battle over women’s rights and educational vision described by Goldstein in Chapter 2 was rudely interrupted by the onset of the Civil War and the emergence on the national scene of an entirely new battleground: how to best educate the children of recently freed slaves.
In Chapter 3, Goldstein walks the reader through the vigorous debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, bookended by profiles of two black women whose life and work showed how these tensions played out and were in some cases, successfully resolved.
Laborers vs. Citizens: Educating the First Generation of Free Black Americans
Du Bois, a free-born black man from Massachusetts, moved to a Confederacy-ravaged black community to teach after graduating from college. He boarded with the families he served and witnessed first-hand the slavery’s devastation. As a budding intellectual, he was particularly grieved by the disparity between the classical education he recieved and the type of curriculum being offered to his impoverished students as well as their teachers. Throughout the rest of his life, he would argue that the focus of education for black students should be to identify the bright ones – “the Talented Tenth” – and get them into an elite, classical educational environment as quickly as possible so that they could continue to lead their people forward. This call, however, was mostly ignored by the most influential, on-the-ground, black educator in the nation: Booker T. Washington.
Unlike DuBois, Washington was born into slavery and became a teacher at only nineteen years old. He worked fourteen hour days, spending himself on teaching, developing skills and working to provide basic services so students and families could afford some semblance of a living. In his view, helping his people reach a “higher life” was more than satisfying despite little to no compensation. As befits this upbringing and lifestyle, Booker was quickly formed into a pragmatic man who prioritized action. His mission was to ensure the mass of his people received a good education which was defined by the acquisition of practical skills, vocational training, and just as importantly, the ability to take what you learned and then turn around to teach others.
Thus began a philosophical debate over how to best educate descendants of slaves. Should you prioritize an education on par with what white elite children expected to receive or focus mostly on providing vocational training so the descendants could at least earn a living? I imagine Washington took the view that it wasn’t worth trying to play the same game as white people if the rules were rigged, and so the most pragmatic thing to do was to take what you can to slowly build a better life and eventually, society. Du Bois, idealistic and no doubt made confident by his own ascent through Harvard and his earned respectability, considered this to be too low a bar. Over time, some compromise would be made, and Du Bois would agree that only the best and brightest black students should be pushed into the elite institutions while the rest should receive the vocational training Washington advocated. Goldstein sums up the conflict as essentially just a debate over emphasis:
Whether to focus philanthropists and policy makers on creating basic educational opportunities for the black masses, or on ensuring access to higher education for a smaller number of African Americans.
Washington and Du Bois likely had similar ends in mind but preferred different means. Washington preferred to slowly fight and build from the ground up and Du Bois believed true change would only come from the top down. Both stances are not surprising coming from a slave-turned-educational leader on one side and an Ivy League educated intellectual on the other. Washington had the upper hand for most of their lives, because he was a pragmatic man in a pragmatic age, whereas Du Bois was an intellectual amidst a country and educational milieu pervaded by anti-intellectualism. Regardless of what Du Bois preferred, Washington was the one starting normal schools, churning out graduates and setting the tone. Washington was also not above making controversial, pragmatic concessions – such as meekly demurring to racist philanthropists who were happy to help black people get an education so long as they didn’t get “uppity” or fill their minds with knowledge that was beyond their grasp, like the Classics or philosophy – in order to secure their money to use for his own purposes.
Du Bois scoffed at these tactics but Washington’s response to an upturned nose was usually a newly opened school.
Forten & Cooper: The Warriors on the Ground
The heart of the chapter is on DuBois and Washington’s debate, but Goldstein effectively weaves their competing visions through the stories of two black women who were hard at work doing the work.
The first profiel she provides is of Charlotte Forten, a free, wealthy black woman who adopted the missionary teacher mantle at a young age and went to help her recently freed people in the South after the start of Reconstruction. Her story is used as segue into the overarching milieu and conflict at the time, but it’s the second educator Goldisten focuses on – Anna Julia Cooper – that provides the most compelling reading of this chapter.
Anna Julia Cooper was the daughter of a black slave and white slave owner who spent the entirety of her life embedded in the work of teaching children. Throughout her life, Cooper integrated and seemingly resolved the visions of Washington and DuBois. As befitted her background, she had little room for mere idealism, but as someone who received an elite education herself, she was insistent about teaching her students, both male and female, the types of things many felt should be best left to “other” children. Cooper lived within the tension of the hard necessities of life that Washington knew intimately and the dignifying and soul-lifting pleasures of a true education, focused not only on skills needed to survive, but on the great ideas, stories and virtues of humankind. No student of hers would lack for either.
I confess to knowing nothing about Cooper prior to this chapter, and feeling somewhat ashamed of this after having finished. She was a force entirely unique and underappreciated. She expressed each of her identities – black, woman, teacher, former slave, intellectual, devout Christian – in ways so congruous and potent it shames lazy categorization. While she was not invisible, due to her prolific writing and speeches, the impression Goldstein paints of her is of someone quietly but relentlessly pursuing the good of others.
For example, Cooper was for women empowerment in ways that differentiated her from the popular feminism of the time. She deviated from Stanton and Anthony’s vision of women finally being able to do the same as what men did and ascribed to a more community-centric vision where women are freed to give much more of their unique selves to their communities than society currently allowed (63). In an 1890 speech, she declared:
The earnest, well-trained Christian young woman, as a teacher, as a home-maker, as wife, mother or silent influence even, is as potent a missionary agency among our people as the theologian. […] And I claim that at the present stage of our development in the South she is ever more important and necessary.” (63)
In her feminism as well as in her pedagogy, Cooper gracefully held the tension set up by Washington and DuBois. She was pragmatic in ways that Booker would appreciated, always pushing to get all black children what they needed to take just the next step in their life, but she also would become the fourth ever black woman in U.S. history to receive a Ph.D. and was dead-set on producing graduates who would flood the elite academic institutions of the land. In fact, Goldstein points out that it was Cooper’s ability to realize this mission that led to her career’s demise, since a good deal of folk with power in D.C. preferred their city’s black boys and girls to be content with the wages of a hard day’s labor rather than to compete with their own children for college admittance. Under the pretext of a bogus moral accusation, Cooper would eventually be let go from her role as principal but would go on to be a professor and nationally-recognized speaker.
I have now obtained a collection of essays and speeches by Cooper and eagerly look forward to reading them.
Some questions this chapter left me with:
- How do DuBois and Washington’s arguments – vocational training versus classical, academic instruction – play out in our current public school systems? It would seem we value the latter more than the former, but perhaps it’s only because college is a pathway to a high-earning job. In other words, DuBois’ argument might seem more realized today, but we might be as far if not further from it than when he originally voiced it.
- How potent might a black education system have been if DuBois and Washington had focused on working together to see both of their visions realized than making their arguments from across the aisle? Combining DuBois’ ability to generate a long-term vision combined with Washington’s proclivity to action and getting things done might have resulted in some striking long-term outcomes.
- Why aren’t we talking more about Anna Julia Cooper? And if we are talking about her, why haven’t I been listening?
The Red Book 