Roots to Routes: Black Intellectual Labor and the Politics of Higher Education in North Carolina, 1790-1891

Abstract

For a brief moment, it seemed that the routes to higher education would diversify infinitely as hundreds of thousands of freedpeople enrolled in colleges at the close of the Civil War. Free and enslaved African Americans melded traditional education – the pursuit of a classical curriculum and theological training – with manual and vocational training in a tradition dating back to the colonial era. What would come to be known as Head, Hand, and Heart work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fundamentally shaped by, and rooted in, antebellum pedagogies. Yet, conversations about the direction of Black education narrowed as the nineteenth century came to a close and industrial training took preference over all other approaches. Scholars have often mis-attributed this postbellum rise of industrial education to Booker T. Washington’s peculiar politics of education. By historicizing this transition as it played out in North Carolina, a pioneering state for the establishment of HBCUs, I argue that Washington’s politics of education was in fact a complex set of maneuvers between state and federal forces attempting to control Black education on the one hand, and a burgeoning class of Black intellectuals attempting to raise a generation “up from slavery” on the other.To offer insight into how African American higher education developed in the direction of industrial education, I adopt the methods of intellectual historians. I ask how Black intellectuals articulated justifications for their education, what they hoped to learn as they traversed various routes to attain higher education, and how they interpreted government-backed industrialization of that education.