The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

He found … that in spite of the disorganization of their lives, whenever the freedmen made the effort to build a school or house of worship they tended to settle around it and their habits showed immediate improvement. They felt it was something that they owned and to which they belonged. It made a vast difference in their lives. It would take some of them quite a while to move the awkward distance from saying “Master,” to saying “Mister,” but it had taken them no time at all to respond with glowing faces to “ladies” and “gentlemen” and “scholars.” It gave them a new image of themselves.

  Eight years later in Malden, West Virginia, a nineteen-year-old teacher who had been born into slavery, Booker T. Washington, had a similar experience. He worked from eight in the morning until ten at night teaching the children of emancipated slaves basic math and reading, as well as personal hygiene: how to comb one’s hair, bathe regularly, and use a toothbrush. He established a reading room and a debating society, tutored working adults in the evenings, and prepared the village’s most talented young black men and women for admission to the new colored normal schools springing up across the South. This frantic time “was one of the happiest periods of my life,” Washington wrote in Up from Slavery. “I now felt that I had the opportunity to help the people of my home town to a higher life.… Without regard to pay and with little thought of it, I taught any one who wanted to learn anything I could teach him.”

  Many of the teachers who told the tale of education after emancipation romanticized their exhausting work. Reconstruction was a heady time for social progressives, just as the 1960s would be for a later generation of activists who went south. But there was another story to tell: how the black schools founded in the decades after the Civil War presaged a long history of entrenched poverty, racial segregation, underpaid black teachers, and lowered academic expectations for children of color.

  In 1866 President Andrew Johnson allowed the former Sea Islands plantation owners to reclaim their land. The Port Royal Experiment in communal black ownership and education ended, and many of the freedmen and -women became sharecroppers. It was a sign of what was to come. The federal government had acknowledged that the education of former slaves should be one of the major goals of Reconstruction, but Congress never appropriated adequate funding for the task, nor did it compel states to do so. In total, the Freedmen’s Bureau spent $5 million on southern black schools between 1865 and 1877, when federal troops left the South. The funds were used mostly to pay rents on schoolhouses, which left black communities footing the bill for up to two-thirds of the cost of running a school—costs such as teacher salaries, books, and desks. Northern charities and religious groups helped fill budget gaps, but by 1880 philanthropic interest in black common schools had greatly diminished. Then a series of state and federal court cases declared it legal for counties to spend more per pupil in white schools than in black schools. In 1899 the Supreme Court ruled in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education that Augusta, Georgia, had not defied the Constitution by shutting down its one black high school while continuing to operate its white high school.

  By 1915, southern states spent three times more on the education of a white child than on the education of a black child. It was not unusual for black students to walk five miles to reach the nearest black school, or for black teachers to receive only one-third the pay of white teachers. As the decades passed, the most educated African Americans saw more and more financial incentives to abandon southern common school classrooms for more lucrative work in northern schools, black colleges, or outside education altogether.

  W. E. B. Du Bois made that journey from teacher to professor to public intellectual. But despite his desire to remain involved with black public education throughout his career, his controversial critique of narrow vocational tracking of black students and teachers eventually prevented him from running the nation’s largest black school system.

  Du Bois was born free in the idyllic Berkshire village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His first close look at southern black poverty came in 1882, when he ventured out from Fisk University’s Nashville campus, where he was an undergraduate, to search for a summer teaching job in a black common school. To earn his state teaching credential, he enrolled in the Lebanon Teachers’ Institute, which instructed whites in the daytime and blacks in the evening. Like Charlotte Forten, Du Bois had received a classical education at an integrated public high school. He was shocked by the rudimentary skills taught in what passed for a Tennessee normal academy: “fractions and spelling and other mysteries.” His teaching certification easily won, he set out on foot to find a school willing to hire him, and eventually he secured a position in the sharecropping region of Wilson County, Tennessee, where living conditions were so severe that Du Bois felt he had “touched the very shadow of slavery.”

  He boarded with black families in one-room homes, and taught thirty students, including some married young adults, in an uncomfortable log hut, once the corn repository of a Confederate colonel. Du Bois loved his little school and appreciated the trust he won from the sharecropping families. “[T]he fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvelous,” he wrote in an 1899 Atlantic essay about the experience. “We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.”

  Most Wilson County children attended school only sporadically. Du Bois visited their homes to check on their whereabouts, but parents informed him that they needed their children to work in the fields. Even his brightest students, Du Bois concluded, had little chance of using education to escape the circumstances into which they had been born. His Atlantic essay ended on an elegiac note. Though the children of sharecroppers hungered for knowledge, in reality, “their weak wings beat against their barriers;—barriers of caste, of youth, of life.”

  Du Bois and Booker Washington would spend years debating the proper education for the descendants of slaves—especially those who would become teachers. Both men based their careers as educational theorists in part on their own school experiences. In 1881 the white founder of Virginia’s Hampton Institute, the early black normal school where Washington had trained to become a teacher, recommended Washington to the state of Alabama, which was looking for a black educator to launch a school for former slaves and their children, in the town of Tuskegee. Washington took the job. He knew that black people in the rural region surrounding the Tuskegee Institute were largely illiterate and heavily in debt. Drawing upon his own experience at Hampton, which taught only the equivalent of a modern middle-school curriculum, he believed his new students needed a basic education in reading and numeracy, as well as hands-on vocational training in brickmaking, tailoring, and carpentry—skills he hoped would inculcate personal discipline and industry. Du Bois, on the other hand, studied at Harvard and the University of Berlin. He dreamed of catapulting the most academically promising poor black children, whom he dubbed the “talented tenth,” straight from abject southern poverty into the intelligentsia by providing them with a classical education in literature, history, math, Latin, and Greek. Washington rejoined: “One man may go into a community prepared to supply the people there with an analysis of Greek sentences. The community may not at that time be prepared for, or feel the need of, Greek analysis, but it may feel its need of bricks and houses and wagons.”

  For the black population outside the talented tenth, Du Bois came to enthusiastically support vocational education, along with a broader agenda of working-class solidarity and labor organization across racial lines. Washington, meanwhile, sent his own children to four-year liberal arts colleges and encouraged his Tuskegee students to read widely and pursue higher education if they could afford it. Most Tuskegee graduates became common school teachers, not skilled laborers. So the infamous debate between Du Bois and Washington was mostly a disagreement over emphasis: whether to focus philanthropists and policy makers on creating basic educational opportunities for the black masses, or on ensuring acce
ss to higher education for a smaller number of African Americans.*2 As he reflected on his Wilson County teaching experience, Du Bois often mentioned his former student Josie Dowell, a bright twenty-year-old who had dreamed of attending college, only to find herself relegated to domestic servitude. Du Bois’s bitterness toward Washington was partly motivated by the fact that the Tuskegee founder’s huge success in defining the turn-of-the-century educational philanthropic agenda as a vocational one meant there was little private money left over to provide children like Josie with access to higher education. As Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt visited Tuskegee and magnates like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller showered the school with praise and donations, more academically oriented black colleges such as Fisk and Atlanta University, where Du Bois taught, struggled to raise money and maintain their core programs, despite their record of success in minting black lawyers, doctors, and professors.

  Another major disagreement between the two thinkers centered not so much on the role of the teacher—both men idealized the missionary black educator—as on what kind of training black teachers should receive before managing a classroom. Du Bois understood public school teachers as part of the college-going talented tenth. He was an early and prescient critic of teacher training programs that focused too much on pedagogy at the expense of content knowledge, writing, “It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.”

  Washington, on the other hand, rushed to assure the Tuskegee Institute’s white benefactors that black students there were not receiving a rigorous classical education. Henry Villard, a German-born journalist, publisher of The Nation, and early investor in western railroads, made at least two modest donations to Tuskegee. In 1897 he was dismayed by a letter he received from a student thanking him for his contribution; she wrote that she had studied natural philosophy, ancient history, algebra, classical music, and civil government and rhetoric. Villard fumed in a letter to Washington that black students with “immature minds” were “not prepared” to absorb this type of curriculum; he accused the Tuskegee founder of concealing the true nature of his school, which Villard thought should prepare girls exclusively for domestic service and boys for agricultural and mechanical trades. Villard’s racism would have lit a fire under a man like Du Bois, but Washington, ever a pragmatist, likely hoped to secure more funding from the industrialist. He responded to Villard with a solicitous letter, explaining that “youthful ambition” had caused the student to inflate her coursework, and that “civil government” was a basic class about division of power, while “classical music” meant only that the girl sang in the school choir. If Alabama law allowed it, Washington wrote, he would have lowered the level of math taught at Tuskegee. “I would say your criticism has done us good,” he closed, “and I thank you for it.”

  According to biographer Robert Norrell, on northern fund-raising expeditions, Washington rarely mentioned that Tuskegee alumni were not only teaching common school in large numbers, but were also opening normal academies across the Black Belt, to train new generations of teachers. Tuskegee’s wide circle of influence in teacher training discomfited Du Bois. Like the northern feminists who wanted female teachers to be educated at co-ed colleges, not less rigorous normal schools, Du Bois thought prospective black teachers would have received a more appropriate education at full-fledged universities. He believed black teachers should be “gifted persons” well acquainted with elite white ways of learning, so that they could decode mainstream norms for black children, helping them “to cope with the white world on its own ground and in its own thought, method and language.” He worried that Tuskegee-trained teachers, who had never studied a foreign language nor struggled with calculus, would be unprepared to truly expand their pupils’ minds.

  Much of Du Bois’s writing on teachers is deeply resonant today; many contemporary education reformers insist that public schools will not improve unless more elite college graduates are brought into the teaching profession. Washington’s historical reputation, on the other hand, has always been mixed. Especially in the wake of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, many progressives came to see him as a compromised Uncle Tom figure, a self-appointed spokesman for African Americans who, in his quest for philanthropic support, went too far in bending to white racist assumptions about blacks’ intellectual capabilities. “Washington stands for Negro submission and slavery,” Du Bois wrote to a friend in 1910. “Representing that, with unlimited funds, he can afford to be broad and generous and most of us must accept the generosity or starve.”

  In fact, both Du Bois and Washington expressed ideas that either became common practice or remain at the heart of education debates. In private Sunday evening lectures Washington girded Tuskegee students with detailed, practical advice about how to open and support new schools for black children: New teachers must seek the trust and support of local ministers and community organizations; they should go door-to-door asking black parents to enroll their children in school; through cookouts and fairs, they should raise money to extend the school year from three months to eight. More than a century later, many contemporary charter schools in black neighborhoods draw students in through door-to-door recruiting, and advocates for “extended learning time” call for (and many charters require) a longer school day, week, and year. Both men lobbied on behalf of congressional bills that would have provided supplemental federal funding to schools serving poor black children in regions with high illiteracy rates. It took until 1965, when Washington had been dead for nearly half a century and Du Bois for two years, for Congress to finally pass the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which did exactly that.

  At the turn of the century, only one predominantly black public school system in the United States received significant federal funding: the segregated colored schools of Washington, D.C. Because of extra dollars from Congress, there was no pay gap between white and black public school teachers working in the nation’s capital, which made Washington a magnet for ambitious black educators.

  One of them was Anna Julia Cooper, the daughter of a North Carolina slave and the white man who owned her. For six decades, from her adolescence until her retirement at age seventy-two, Cooper taught in black public schools and colleges. Her long tenure in the classroom tested many of the ideas around which Du Bois and Washington debated. Politically, the two men lobbied for higher teacher pay, yet they often advised individual young black teachers to ignore their low salaries and the day-to-day administrative headaches of their jobs, and instead to approach their work with what Washington called a “missionary spirit.” When Du Bois’s goddaughter complained that the rural Mississippi public school in which she taught was disorganized, “backward and dumb,” he returned a loving, but stern rebuke, advising her to ignore the school’s unprofessional principal and the other, less well-educated teachers. “Your real duty is, of course, to the children, and they are entirely deserving,” he preached. “You ought to put your whole life and energy in stirring them out of their lethargy and carelessness.”

  Anna Cooper could not afford the luxury of such idealism. She was born a slave, widowed at twenty-one, and never remarried. In middle age, she essentially adopted five needy children. So teaching was not only Cooper’s calling, but also her permanent livelihood. Consequently, she fought throughout her career for higher pay. And although teacher unionism did not come to Washington, D.C., until 1916, a decade earlier Cooper independently pushed an agenda that was similar to that of the northern, predominantly white teachers organizations founded at the turn of the century. She critiqued early IQ testing and resisted administrative and philanthropic efforts to direct an increasing number of poor children into purely vocational courses.

  Cooper’s own education had proceeded very much along the lines of Du Bois�
��s hopes for the talented tenth. Born Annie Haywood, she was just six years old at the end of the Civil War and was lucky to live near the Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, which had been founded by the Episcopal Church to provide former slaves with a rigorous classical education. Annie displayed an early aptitude for the written word and was soon on the school’s payroll as a tutor to her fellow students. In the evenings she would teach her mother the basics of reading and writing. “My mother was a slave and the finest woman I have ever known,” Cooper wrote many decades later. “It is one of my happiest childhood memories explaining for her the subtle differences between q’s and g’s or between b’s and l’s.”

  At Saint Augustine’s, Annie took classes in Latin, algebra, and geometry. She met her future husband, the Reverend George Cooper, in Greek class. Both Coopers stayed on to teach at the school after graduation, but the energetic young minister died in 1879, leaving young Anna Cooper bereaved, but also free to pursue her growing ambitions. In 1881 she applied to Oberlin, a co-ed Christian college in Ohio that had served as a busy stop on the Underground Railroad. Cooper would have been aware of Oberlin’s abolitionist reputation, as well as the fact that it was one of the few white liberal arts colleges in the United States that accepted black women. Her thirst for further education—a drive that would later lead her to become one of the first African American women to earn a PhD—shines through in her application letter to Oberlin president James Fairchild, as does her displeasure at the low wages (about $30 per month) she then earned as a teacher:

  I have for a long time earnestly desired to take an advanced classical course in some superior Northern college, but could not see my way to it for lack of means.… I am now teaching a two months’ summer school in Haywood; Southern schools pay very meanly, but I expect to have money enough to keep me one or two years at your College, provided I can secure the favor … of free tuition and incidentals.