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The Higher Education Debate
At the turn of the last century, African Americans debated strategies for individual and collective progress. Most -- laypeople and intellectuals alike -- agreed that education was the key to racial uplift and social change. Yet educational innovators differed sharply on which educational philosophy would prove to be the most useful: some, looking to immediate practical needs, believed that new schools should offer industrial education for African Americans, while others promoted a classical education based in the liberal arts tradition.
Booker T. Washington famously articulated his ideas in an 1895 speech: "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now," he said, was" worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house." Washington put his ideas into action at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Washington became the country's most powerful African American educator, though his continuing emphasis on industrial education, refusal to agitate for civil equality, and his dismissal of the political efforts of other African Americans were seen by some as an endorsement of a role for African Americans as subordinate to whites.
The scholar and critic W.E.B. Du Bois condemned Washington's vision in an essay in his 1903 book SOULS OF BLACK FOLK. Du Bois -- himself Harvard educated -- advocated a liberal arts education, aimed at educating an elite group, the "Talented Tenth," who could lead African Americans into political and social equality. Working to that end, Du Bois was a founder of the Niagara Movement, the precursor to the NAACP.
No matter which set of ideas they might have supported, thousands of African Americans flocked to schools, colleges and universities during Reconstruction and continued to do so through the turn of the last century. In 1912, Tuskegee Institute researcher Monroe Work surveyed more than 540 institutions devoted to the secondary and higher training of African Americans, serving 57,915 students in all. 32,967 of those were elementary students, 3,214 collegiate students, 2,080 professional students, and 29,954 were taking industrial training.
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot's paternal grandparents joined this debate when they moved from Boston to a rural town 25 miles from Jackson, Mississippi, to work as teachers at Utica Normal and Industrial Institute. William Holtzclaw, a protˇgˇ of Booker T. Washington's and a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, modeled Utica's curriculum and pedagogy on Booker T. Washington's philosophy of industrial education, and offered four levels of coursework: elementary, secondary, industrial, and agricultural. Most of the students studied at the elementary level -- building literacy and basic skills -- and all principally took industrial and agricultural courses. So eager were these students for education, families went so far as to barter livestock to pay for their children's tuition.
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