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MISSING DEBATE: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION EXPERIENCE

Georgia Southern University

Missing Debate
The African-American Higher Education Experience

Denise Stewart
History of Higher Education EDLD 7432
Professor Dr. Don Stumpf
October 26, 2014

MISSING DEBATE: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION EXPERIENCE


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Prior to the Civil War, very few African-Americans had the opportunity to attend college.
Most African-Americans were enslaved on plantations, and few freedmen in the North could
afford to attend college. After slavery was abolished, opportunities for African-Americans to
attain higher education increased significantly due to the establishment of what is now the
HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and University) system. Although many of the original
Reconstruction reforms were rolled back after the 1876 Presidential election and the removal of
federal troops from the South, the HBCUs remained viable. Most of the college-educated
African-Americans who remained in the South attended HBCUs because they were prohibited
from attending the Southern state schools due to Jim Crow. Out of the Reconstruction and Jim
Crow South arose Booker T. Washington, one of the foremost intellectuals of the late 19th and
early 20th century.
Washington attended Hampton University (then Hampton Institute), one of the original
HBCUs, and credited Hampton with the education that made him one of the leading AfricanAmerican voices and trendsetters. In the Atlantic, Washington (1896) noted that at Hampton I
found the opportunityin the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the
generousto get training in the classroom and by practical touch with industrial life, to learn
thrift, economy and push. Washingtons Hampton experience inspired him to create a new
school in Alabama called the Tuskegee Institute, which became world-famous for its agricultural
and even military feats (as it produced some of the best fighter pilots that served in World War
II). Washington believed that a college education must be holistic and based upon the skills that
incoming students already knew. For example, Washington assigned laborers to first learn about
running a farm before enrolling them in classes that required advanced literacy skills.

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On the other hand, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the first African-Americans to attend
Harvard and the first to earn a doctorate degree from that esteemed institution of higher learning.
Du Bois believed that every race had a group of elite men, called the Talented Tenth, and that
African-Americans who demonstrated their educational prowess should enroll in college at every
possible opportunity. Du Bois also believed that the HBCUs, although a commendable program
to educate African-Americans in the South, were of lower quality than the traditional universities
in New England and the Northeast due to the fact that they were more established and still
churned out Americas most consequential leaders. Du Bois believed that freedmen educated in
Northern universities were of higher character because he thought those institutions were built on
character instead of large sums of money from the federal government. Du Bois was also more
radical than Washington at the time; he argued that African-Americans should have equivalent
rights to attend all American universities, which did not exist at the time as the Ivies enforced
strict quotas on black students. Washington believed that the HBCU system, which included his
Tuskegee University, was critical to improving the African-American situation over two or three
generations because most African-Americans still lived in the South and the opportunity for them
to attend a university north of the Mason-Dixon Line were few and far between.
I think a parallel exists between supporters of the Affordable Care Act who accepted it as
a flawed bill and opponents who wanted to kill the bill because it was not liberal enough. The
Affordable Care Act leaves states the option to introduce a public option or single-payer health
care, which is a mark of gradualism (Washingtons idea). The opponents who wanted to kill the
bill due to it not being liberal enough would be equivalent to the radical Du Bois advocates a
century ago.

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References:
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1902, September 1). Of the training of black men. The Atlantic, Retrieved
from http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/blacked/dutrain.htm.
Washington, B. T. (1896, September 1). The awakening of the Negro. The Atlantic, Retrieved
from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1896/09/the-awakening-of-thenegro/305449/

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