Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel

By Horace Mann Bond, Martin Kilson and Wayne J. Urban

Horace Mann Bond was an early twentieth century scholar and a college administrator who focused on higher education for African Americans. His Negro Education in Alabama won Brown University’s Susan Colver Rosenberger Book Prize in 1937 and was praised as a landmark by W. E. B. Dubois in American Historical Review and by scholars in journals such as Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Southern History.
 
A seminal and wide-ranging work that encompasses not only education per se but a keen analysis of the African American experience of Reconstruction and the following decades, Negro Education in Alabama illuminates the social and educational conditions of its period. Observers of contemporary education can quickly perceive in Bond’s account the roots of many of today’s educational challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817389178

Book preview

Negro Education in Alabama

The Library of Alabama Classics,

reprint editions of works important

to the history, literature, and culture of

Alabama, is dedicated to the memory of

Rucker Agee

whose pioneering work in the fields

of Alabama history and historical geography

continues to be the standard of

scholarly achievement.

Negro Education in Alabama

A Study in Cotton and Steel

Horace Mann Bond

With an Introduction by

Wayne J. Urban

and an

Afterword by

Martin Kilson

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA AND LONDON

Introduction and Afterword Copyright © 1994

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bond, Horace Mann, 1904–1972.

Negro education in Alabama: a study in cotton and steel / Horace Mann Bond.

p.      cm.

Reprint. Previously published: New York: Octagon Books, 1969.

With an introduction by Wayne J. Urban and an afterword by Martin Kilson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8173-0734-6

1. Afro-Americans—Education—Alabama. 2. Alabama—Economic conditions.

I. Title.

LC2802.A2B6     1994

370’.8996073'0761—dc20                                   93-42812

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8917-8 (electronic)

TO MY WIFE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY WAYNE J. URBAN

PREFACE

I - SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FORCES IN THE MAKING OF ALABAMA

II - THE EDUCATION OF NEGROES UNDER THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION

III - SOCIAL FORCES IN RECONSTRUCTION

IV - ECONOMIC FORCES IN ALABAMA RECONSTRUCTION

V - THE COURSE OF POLITICAL RECONSTRUCTION, 1865–1875

VI - THE BEGINNING OF AN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM, 1860–1868

VII - PUBLIC EDUCATION OF NEGROES DURING RECONSTRUCTION

VIII - THE OBJECTIVES AND CONTENT OF RECONSTRUCTION EDUCATION

IX - COTTON AND STEEL: ECONOMIC CHANGES IN ALABAMA, 1865–1900

X - ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CHANGES AS AFFECTING THE EDUCATION OF NEGROES, 1875–1900

XI - RACE, CLASS, AND THE SCHOOL FUND, 1875–1900

XII - THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1901: PUBLIC OPINION OF THE NEGRO

XIII - THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1901: TAXATION AND EDUCATION

XIV - THE INFLUENCES OF PERSONALITIES ON THE PUBLIC EDUCATION OF NEGROES IN ALABAMA

XV - COTTON AND STEEL: ECONOMIC CHANGES IN ALABAMA, 1900–1930

XVI - COTTON PLUS STEEL EQUALS SCHOOLS, 1900–1930

XVII - PHILANTHROPY AND NEGRO EDUCATION

XVIII - CONCLUSIONS: NEGRO EDUCATION IN ALABAMA, A STUDY IN COTTON AND STEEL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

AFTERWORD BY MARTIN KILSON

INDEX

LIST OF TABLES

Table

I     MONEY APPROPRIATED AND MONEY SPENT FOR ALABAMA SCHOOLS DURING RECONSTRUCTION

II     A COMPARISON BETWEEN SCHOOL CENSUS AND UNITED STATES CENSUS ENUMERATIONS IN ALABAMA, 1870

III    COAL, IRON ORE, AND PIG IRON PRODUCTION IN ALABAMA, 1870–1900

IV    PERCENTAGES OF TAXES PAID TO THE STATE OF ALABAMA, BY AREAS IN ALABAMA, IN 1852, 1870, 1880, AND 1890

V    VALUATION, TAXATION, AND APPROPRIATIONS FOR SCHOOLS IN ALABAMA, 1875–1900 (BY FIVE-YEAR PERIODS)

VI    EXPENDITURES AND SCHOOL POPULATION IN THE BLACK BELT COUNTY OF WILCOX, BY RACE, 1876–1930

VII   PERCENTAGE OF NEGROES LIVING IN CITIES IN ALABAMA—1890–1930

VIII   PERCENTAGES OF NEGROES GAINFULLY EMPLOYED IN ALABAMA, 1910 AND 1930, BY SELECTED OCCUPATIONS AND BY SEX

IX    PERCENTAGE OF STATE TAXES PAID BY DIFFERENT AREAS IN ALABAMA, 1900–1930

X    PERCENTAGE OF NEGRO ILLITERACY—1910–1930—BY AREAS

XI    ENROLLMENT OF NEGRO CHILDREN PER TEACHER, 1910–1930

XII   PERCENTAGE OF NEGRO AND WHITE ELEMENTARY TEACHERS OF VARIOUS EDUCATIONAL LEVELS

XIII    EXPENDITURES FOR TEACHERS’ SALARIES PER CAPITA NEGRO AND WHITE CHILD ENUMERATED IN ALABAMA BY AREAS, 1910–1930

XIV   NUMBER OF COUNTY TRAINING SCHOOLS IN ALABAMA AIDED BY THE JOHN F. SLATER FUND, 1913–1930

XV   SUMMARY OF COMPLETED ROSENWALD BUILDINGS IN ALABAMA DIVIDED BY PERIODS, 1912–1920 AND 1920–1932

XVI   ROSENWALD SCHOOLS AND SOURCES OF EXPENDITURES IN THE PERIOD 1920–1930 BY ALABAMA AREAS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure

1  WHITE AND NEGRO POPULATION PER SQUARE MILE IN ALABAMA AREAS, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930

2  DISTRIBUTION OF COAL AND IRON ORES IN ALABAMA

3  THE CHIEF NATURAL RESOURCES OF ALABAMA, WITH THE PRINCIPAL RAILROAD LINES (BUILT, BUILDING, OR PROPOSED) INVOLVED IN RECONSTRUCTION POLITICS

4  A RECONSTRUCTION TEACHER’S MONTHLY REPORT

5  COTTON PRODUCED IN ALABAMA AREAS, 1850, 1870, 1880, 1890

6  CHANGES IN THE CENTRALIZATION OF WEALTH IN ALABAMA AS SHOWN BY THE PERCENTAGE OF ALL STATE TAXES PAID BY EACH AREA, 1852, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930

7  EQUALIZATION IN ALABAMA

8  EXPENDITURES PER CAPITA SCHOOL CHILD FOR SALARIES OF WHITE AND NEGRO TEACHERS IN ALABAMA, 1890, 1910, 1930

INTRODUCTION

Wayne J. Urban

Horace Mann Bond was one of the leading African-American scholars and intellectuals of the generation that came to prominence in the second third of the twentieth century.¹ Bond and his peers were sandwiched in between two sets of black intellectuals and activists whose accomplishments were substantial. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois towered over black life in the early twentieth century, and Horace’s son, Julian Bond, and the other civil rights activists of the 1960s, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, dominated in the period after 1960. In between these two landmark eras and famous sets of leaders, Horace Bond and a few others such as St. Clair Drake, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, and Allison Davis labored both to analyze African-American life and to use their analyses to improve its prospects.

Horace Bond was one of five children born to James and Jane Bond, who met and married at Oberlin College when both were students there. Jane Bond trained for teaching at Oberlin and taught school for a number of years after her marriage. After receiving a theology degree, James Bond became a pastor at churches in Nashville, Tennessee (adjacent to the Fisk University campus); Talladega, Alabama (on the campus of Talladega College); and Atlanta, Georgia (close to Atlanta University). During World War I, James took a job in Kentucky doing social work among African-American recruits to the armed forces. James would remain in Kentucky for the rest of his life.

Horace Bond was born in Nashville in 1904. He was educated in Talladega, Atlanta, and in Kentucky. He took his undergraduate degree at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and received a masters and a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago. He held faculty positions in the 1920s at Langston University (Oklahoma), the Alabama State Teachers College (Montgomery), and Fisk University and in the 1930s at Fisk and at Dillard University. He also held administrative positions as a department chair and dean respectively at Fisk and Dillard. He became president of Fort Valley State College in Georgia in 1939 and served in that position until 1945. In that year he became president of Lincoln University, a position he held until 1957. He finished his academic career at Atlanta University as Dean of the School of Education and, then, as Director of the Bureau of Educational Research. He died in 1972, shortly after retiring from Atlanta University.

Bond made his greatest scholarly contributions in the 1930s, when he published Negro Education in Alabama as well as another book and several articles.² The major field to which Negro Education contributed was the history of education. The tools of study that Bond employed in this work were historical methods and social scientific analysis informed by critical, sociological insight. The purposes for which these scholarly tools were used, however, the analysis and betterment of the educational and social conditions of black Americans, had been established in some of Bond’s earliest childhood experiences. These purposes animated most of his professional activities throughout his life.

Negro Education in Alabama was the published version of Bond’s doctoral dissertation, which was completed in 1936 and titled Social and Economic Influences on the Public Education of Negroes in Alabama, 1865–1930. Bond had considerable difficulty trying to arrange for publication of his dissertation manuscript. Initially, he tried Charles Thompson of the Journal of Negro Education, suggesting that the work be the first of a series of monographs published by the Journal. Thompson, still struggling to establish his journal, which was less than five years old, could not accommodate his friend. Next, Bond tried the presses of the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago. The southern press was initially positive, but ultimately demurred. The University of Chicago Press was interested in publication of Bond’s dissertation, but only if the manuscript was shortened substantially. Bond felt that such a change would severely harm the integrity of his work. However, he received the good news during this period that the dissertation had been chosen to receive a prize and a small cash award from the University of Chicago. He also was buoyed by a grant of $500 toward publication from the Julius Rosenwald Fund.³

Combining the prize money and some of his own funds, Bond was able to offer a subsidy of $700 to Carter G. Woodson’s Associated Publishers, which published the book in 1939. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was a giant in the early development of the field of black history. He recognized in Bond’s work a study of great value to blacks in their pursuit of educational justice as well as a solid historiographical contribution to Reconstruction history and black history.⁴

Negro Education in Alabama culminated a period of extensive research by Bond into the social and educational conditions of blacks in the South, and particularly in Alabama, and into the historical causes behind those conditions. In 1927, as noted earlier, he had served on the faculty of the Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery. His major responsibility was as Director of Extension work at the college, coordinating the off-campus instructional and service activities of the college at black elementary and secondary schools throughout the state and teaching off-campus courses. Though he stayed in this job for only a year, he initiated numerous contacts within the state of Alabama that would help him professionally for the next several years. In the summer of 1929 and again in the summer of 1930 he taught at Tuskegee Institute. Also in this period, he worked for the Julius Rosenwald Fund on a study of educational conditions among whites and blacks in three southern states, including Alabama.⁵ This work, along with the summer teaching at Tuskegee, cemented the links between Bond and numerous black educators in Alabama and also pointed the way toward Bond’s dissertation topic.

As he worked on the Rosenwald project, Bond also wrote two articles on aspects of black education and social life in Alabama. In the first, published in the University of Chicago based American Journal of Sociology, Bond described conditions in two mixed-race communities in the Mobile area. While both of these communities were biracial, they differed substantially in many ways. The inhabitants of one group lived in well-tended homes and made sure that their children attended school and achieved academically. Members of the other group lived in shacks, ignored the education of their children, and this neglect showed up in the low academic achievement of the children.⁶ Bond located the primary source of difference in the two groups in their religious stance. The former group was highly religious and its experience showed how religious values could yield desirable secular outcomes such as exemplary living habits and high academic achievement. Conversely, a lack of religion was a major factor in explaining the poor living conditions and a lack of achievement in the second group.

In another article from his Alabama years, published in the general circulation magazine Harper’s, Bond sought to establish that he and other African Americans from Alabama and the rest of the South were as genuinely southern as whites from the region. African Americans had lived in Alabama for generations and loved the state, and the region, as much as any white people did. For Bond, the deference of black southerners to whites, though coerced, was also an instinctive exercise of the gentleness that was characteristic of southern black behavior in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In contrast, he depicted the manners of whites as deteriorating in the same period. Unlike planters and other scions of the old South who held to a paternalistic standard of courtesy and propriety in their contact with blacks, twentieth-century white southerners seemed crude, loud, and offensive. These characteristics were particularly present in the politicians of the twentieth-century South, such as James Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. For Bond, southern whites needed a good dose of the manners of their ancestors. In an ironic if not sarcastic aside, he wondered why the money that was then being taken away from the segregated schools for black children in the South to educate white children to a higher level was not serving the positive purpose of reinfusing white children with some of the manners that their grandparents had possessed and that their parents had lost.⁷

Bond’s invocation of the old South as a contrast to the viciousness of the twentieth-century South was a clever move that allowed him to make a critique of the current situation in the South without exhibiting any overt antipathy to the region. It is doubtful that white southerners read the article and took its message to heart, but blacks could read it and see a sign of hope in the ability of one of their own to publish comments critical of the white South in a national periodical. Bond’s critical comments in the article about the inequality in school funding for black and white children also foreshadowed a major theme of his scholarly efforts in the decade of the 1930s.

Since Negro Education in Alabama was the outstanding single achievement of Bond in that decade, some description of the actual circumstances of how he conducted the research on that volume is in order. During the summer of 1930, his second summer of teaching at Tuskegee, Bond began historical inquiry into the education of African Americans in Alabama, using the documents on the topic from the Alabama State Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. This research culminated in his dissertation and also informed the case he made for more equity for blacks in the textbook he published in 1934.⁸

In the Preface to the published edition of Negro Education, Bond acknowledged the contributions of two Alabamians to his historical work in the Archives. The first was a noted southern lady and member of a prominent Alabama family, Marie Bankhead Owen, the director of the Alabama State Archives in Montgomery. What Bond did not say in the Preface was that Mrs. Owen handled the awkward situation of a black scholar working in the segregated archives of the state by locating an out of the way place for him to study in relative peace and quiet away from the stares or other unwanted attentions of white visitors to the facility.⁹

The second Alabamian Bond acknowledged was in every way the antithesis of Marie Bankhead Owen. Bond knew only the first name of the African-American prison inmate Amos, a trusty who was assigned by the prison system to work in the state archives. Yet his acknowledgment of that inmate showed his own affinity for the less advantaged members of his race.

As a matter of pure sentiment, I should like to conclude these acknowledgments by referring to a Negro trusty known to me only as Amos, who was in 1930–1932 attached to the Alabama State Department of Archives at Montgomery. By now I understand that Amos has paid his debt to society, and presumably is working out his destiny as a free member of the social order. By his thorough knowledge of the materials in the Alabama Archives, and his unvarying solicitude for the comfort of my wife and of myself, Amos remains as more than a pleasant memory. He has been a constant source of inspiration in the pursuit of this study.¹⁰

Bond’s appreciation for and invocation of this black convict also suggested that his own study of education for blacks in Alabama involved more than a dispassionate, scholarly rendering of the subject. Bond’s book shows that the plight of Amos and other black natives of Alabama had its roots in the historical circumstances he recounted, beginning with the provisions for the freedmen and their education during Reconstruction.

Given that Negro Education was mainly a historical study, it should not be surprising that the book made a major contribution to the field of Reconstruction history. Bond contested the existing interpretations of Reconstruction in Alabama, particularly the work of Walter Linwood Fleming. Author of the then standard work, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, Fleming had been a student of William A. Dunning at Columbia University.¹¹ Fleming’s dissertation served as the core of his published work on Reconstruction in Alabama. The work of Dunning and his students glorified the old South and defended white southerners and their treatment of the freedmen after the Civil War. Fleming used his scholarly accomplishment, particularly its defense of the values of the old South, to rise to a deanship at Vanderbilt University. He was acknowledged as one of the leading intellectual lights of the established South of the 1930s.

Bond’s view of Fleming’s scholarship was summarized some years later in a letter to John Hope Franklin. He told Franklin that Fleming’s footnotes revealed him to be an unreliable scholar, one who twisted quotations to fit his preconceptions and who labeled the ideas of die-hard southerners as those of northerners. Summarizing this type of work, Bond told Franklin that it was downright skulduggery.¹²

Bond’s own discussion of Reconstruction in Alabama differed substantially from Fleming’s critique of the Reconstruction legislature in Alabama. Bond omitted the beloved figures of what he later referred to as the vaudeville of what has been Southern History—the vicious carpetbagger and the equally vicious Scalawag, the stereotypical ignorant, misled Negro voter and politician and the equally stereotypical noble southern White Man striving desperately to preserve ‘the Southern Way of Life.’ In place of these caricatures drawn by Fleming and other southern historians, Bond offered an interpretation based on underlying economic patterns. As he described his book two decades after its publication, he remarked:

I saw Alabama Reconstruction History as the struggle between great aggregations of capital, seeking in this, and other States, to weld together economic empires. These I typified by studying the railroads, that were the basic skeletal framework on which empires were then built. I saw the Democratic Party as the party of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad . . . ; I saw the Republican [P]arty . . . as the party of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad (now the Southern). . . .¹³

Bond particularly attacked Fleming’s contention that the Reconstruction-era government of Alabama, heavily influenced if not controlled by blacks, saddled the state with an onerous debt of thirty million dollars. Bond showed that the debt was a result of political commitments made to the various railroad interests and that the amount of genuine debt incurred under the Reconstruction government compared quite favorably with that incurred by the pre-Civil War and post-Reconstruction regimes.¹⁴

The scholarly merit of Bond’s analysis of Reconstruction in Alabama was noted almost immediately after its publication. One year after its publication, the noted historian Howard K. Beale relied on Bond’s work for his own analysis of Alabama in a landmark article on Reconstruction history, published in the American Historical Review.¹⁵ Basically, Beale applied the critical perspective Bond had used to study Alabama Reconstruction to the phenomenon in other southern states. Beale came up with conclusions similar to those of Bond.

By the 1950s, Bond’s work, along with that of historians such as Beale, Roger Shugg, Vernon L. Wharton, and Francis Simkins and Robert H. Woody, had coalesced into a revisionist school of Reconstruction history. Bond’s work and that of other revisionists, along with selections from the traditional school of southern analyses of Reconstruction, was anthologized in a 1952 volume of conflicting interpretations of the period. By the 1960s, revisionist interpretations such as Bond’s had reached the point of being in an interpretive ascendancy.¹⁶

Since the 1960s, however, Reconstruction history has undergone a series of developments intended to supersede the earlier debate between traditionalists and revisionists. In the 1970s, several historians of Reconstruction stressed the lack of commitment to the freedman by northern radicals in Congress and in the Freedmen’s Bureau. These scholars bypassed both the traditionalist attack and revisionist defense of Congress and the Bureau. Though Bond was a vigorous defender of Thaddeus Stevens, O. O. Howard, and other northern humanitarians, his discussion of Reconstruction-era education in Alabama saw it as exemplifying both humanitarianism and the political opportunism of northern capitalism. Thus, he was not completely unaware of the forces that later historians would see as critical to an understanding of Reconstruction.

The failure by Congress to achieve fulfillment of the pledge of forty acres and a mule to the freedman is another important point for contemporary historians of Reconstruction that Bond did not overlook. Speaking of the freed slaves, he remarked: these masses . . . knew exactly what they needed. . . . They asked for a subsistence farmstead—for forty acres and a mule. Taking land reform as a beginning point, some contemporary historians have used comparative studies of emancipation in several slave-owning countries to show that the formation of classes is perhaps the key event in Reconstruction. A particularly influential recent work argues the significance of class formation for the Reconstruction period, using the categories suggested by Bond in his work. Jonathan Wiener’s Social Origins of the New South chronicles the battle for economic hegemony in Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction Alabama among planters, merchants, and industrialists. Like Bond, whose work is cited in the notes but not discussed, Wiener highlights the position of the freedman as central to this economic conflict.¹⁷

In the last three chapters of his treatment of Reconstruction in Negro Education, as well as in the bulk of the remaining chapters in his book, Bond turned specifically to the topic of education. Here Bond maintained the economic focus that had characterized his more political chapters on Reconstruction.

The major educational historian whose interpretation Bond disputed was Edgar W. Knight. Like Walter L. Fleming, Knight had studied history with William A. Dunning at Columbia. Knight followed the Dunning school in his treatment of Reconstruction educational provisions and, thus, downplayed the accomplishments of the Reconstruction-era governments. Instead, he emphasized the educational achievements of antebellum southern whites and the post-Reconstruction redeemer regimes. In contrast, Bond gave proper credit to Alabama’s Reconstruction government for establishing common schools in Alabama. He also noted, however, that it failed to provide for racially mixed schools, an idea that Knight would never even have considered.¹⁸

In discussing Alabama education in the years after Reconstruction, Bond noted that the main development was the gradual fiscal strangulation of the separate black public schools. In 1887 white planters arranged for passage of a law that made the apportionment of state funds for schools a matter of local discretion, thereby allowing whites in black belt counties with considerable black majorities to use for white schools the per capita funds granted for black students. A constitutional convention in 1901 formally disfranchised Alabama’s black population and adopted limited local taxation for white schools. The local tax provision was a concession to majority white counties that did not have enough black students to provide sufficient state-generated funds to finance the white schools. Bond argued that this local tax provision was much more significant for the improvement of educational opportunities for whites in Alabama than the southern educational revival so cherished by Knight and other southern historians. These two tax measures allowed whites to discriminate in varied ways to ensure that the funds that the public schools did receive could be manipulated to their advantage. Disfranchisement meant that blacks were robbed of any opportunity to contest the situation politically. This discussion of the racial consequences of public school financing in Alabama anticipated Louis Harlan’s 1958 study of race and school finance in five southern seaboard states at the turn of the century in treatment, tone, and illustration of the tragic outcomes.¹⁹

The final section of Bond’s book was composed of four chapters that discussed black schools in Alabama from 1900 to 1930. In this period, he found that educational opportunities for black children were different in rural and urban areas. Rural blacks were more and more reduced to a status of penury. Philanthropic foundations provided the one bright spot in the educational opportunities provided for rural blacks in the early twentieth century. Bond spent a chapter on the activities of these foundations and funds: the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, the Jeanes Fund, the Rosenwald Fund, and the General Education Board. Anticipating late twentieth-century scholarship, Bond was critical in his analysis of philanthropic activities. He noted the acquiescence of the philanthropies in the racial status quo in Alabama as well as their tendency to favor only industrial education for blacks in opposition to any academic education similar to that provided for whites. He also stressed the penchant of the philanthropies for cultivating local white elites as a sure sign that any opportunity provided to blacks would have distinct limits.

One thing that rural blacks could do to alleviate their plight was to move to the industrial cities of Alabama and the North. Industrial development in Alabama centered around Birmingham. Bond noted the genuine improvements achieved in living and educational conditions by Birmingham’s black workers who benefited from company housing, schooling, and other welfare measures. He added, however, that this activity was motivated as much or more by industry’s desire to cultivate black workers as a hedge against labor unrest from its white workforce as it was by any humanitarian sentiments. Here again, Bond anticipated the views of contemporary historians.

Bond’s contribution to educational historiography involved more than anticipating recent scholarship, however. The subtlety and complexity of his interpretations exemplified a level of historical sophistication that is certainly worthy of emulation in any historical or other interpretive work. A prime example of this interpretive acuity occurred in his chapter on Booker T. Washington. Bond began by warning his readers against simply adopting a great man approach to Washington. Rather than fall into the common error of attributing momentous changes to the impress of a great personality like Washington, Bond contended that the lives of men like Washington merely illumine the slow and sub-surface movements of human events.²⁰ The bulk of the chapter was devoted to illustrating the sub-surface movements and factors that helped account for the actions of the eminent Tuskegeean. Bond noted that Washington’s own personal influence in Alabama could not be considered apart from that of the eminent white agent of the Peabody Fund, J. L. M. Curry. Bond carefully laid out Curry’s conservative, privileged background and showed that Curry’s commitment to philanthropic activity for black education was never allowed to become a repudiation of his conservative political principles.

Bond then showed that Washington’s commitment to industrial education was not a principled devotion to an innovative educational philosophy; it was, instead, a means to accommodate black educational development to the suspicions of Curry and other whites that blacks might seek opportunities equal to those provided for whites. Bond argued that at Hampton Washington internalized the lesson that industrial education taught the fundamental moral lessons that Hampton head Samuel Chapman Armstrong sought to instill in his students. The industrial training Washington implemented at Tuskegee was primarily, then, a matter of moral discipline, an emphasis that was also the animating force behind the classical curriculum at institutions such as Fisk and Atlanta universities.

For Bond the main difference between Tuskegee and the classical schools such as Fisk was not mainly in their educational schemes, but in their fundamental attitude toward racial equalitarianism. He contrasted Washington’s circumspection in addressing this issue with the actions of those associated with Fisk University and Atlanta University, individuals J. L. M. Curry described as misguided fanatics who refused to compromise with their environment.²¹ Thus Bond saw Washington’s major failure as political rather than as educational. That political failure was in turn related to Washington’s dependence on whites like Curry.

Bond’s critique of Washington was not punctuated by any personal rancor toward the man. Anticipating modern-day apologists for the wizard of Tuskegee, he acknowledged that, in terms of the educational and political strategy followed by Washington of appealing to the dominant class of whites, it is entirely possible, of course, that no other strategy was feasible. . . . Bond concluded his chapter on Washington by attempting to balance his largely negative evaluation. Bond noted, on the positive side, the successful building of Tuskegee Institute itself, the services provided by its many graduates, and the profound effect Washington exerted on public opinion. In fact, Washington’s claim to greatness rested, for Bond, more in the area of thought, and feeling, and opinion than in any tangible accomplishments. The concluding sentences of the chapter again refer to personality and not to achievements: In his own time Booker T. Washington was a vivid, towering personality; even in our time he has become a legend. And who shall deny the importance of legends, as social forces, in affecting the course of human history.²² These sentences seem to make clear that Washington’s claims to greatness, for Bond, lay in his reputation rather than his accomplishments.

Bond suggested that the final assessment of Washington would have to be made by a later generation of historians who had access to tools sophisticated enough to deal with the areas of personality, thought, feeling, and opinion. The current generation has the benefit of Louis Harlan’s magisterial accomplishment to use as a basis for its own judgments of Washington. Harlan has used the voluminous Washington papers to construct a sophisticated analysis that, while it makes use of much source material on Washington’s secret life unknown to Bond, does not contradict the thrust of Bond’s own interpretation.²³

In coming to a final evaluation of Bond’s contribution to history and educational history, it is important to note that, despite his socioeconomic orientation, he never became a complete economic determinist. It would be extremely hard for a black scholar, who faced the viciousness of racism in a variety of ways in his academic and personal life, to adopt a mode of analysis which relegated that discrimination to a minor role in historical explanation. What was creative in Bond’s book was its combination of economic emphasis with racial and political sensitivity. This combination resulted in a work that rang truer to the complicated reality of the American experience than the mechanistic economic analyses of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction produced by scholars such as Charles A. Beard. Beard, who argued for the economic explanation, to the exclusion of all other factors, could be, and was, easily interpreted by southern apologists as arguing that the South’s treatment of its black population was not an important issue. In contrast, Bond noted the failure of black and white farmers to join in a political coalition based on their common economic interest during Reconstruction and, again, later in the nineteenth century when agrarian movements were on the rise. In this instance, economic interest could not and did not overcome racial antagonism.

Finally, a careful reading of Bond’s entire book will show that his commitments to the cause of black freedom and progress were exhibited throughout the volume, though not overtly paraded in a passionate manner. The book shared with others conceived in its era, such as J. Hugo Johnston’s study of race relations in Virginia, the tendency not to showcase an ideological orientation. Instead, these works drove home their commitment through the force of their scholarship. Winthrop Jordan testified to the attractiveness of this approach in his preface to the 1970 published edition of Johnston’s 1925 thesis. In words that could as easily speak of Horace Mann Bond’s Negro Education in Alabama, Jordan noted:

Some readers today will find his discussion . . . too gentle, and lacking in appropriate moral outrage. . . . It is precisely the attention to and respect for the ‘facts’ which give this study its special value.²⁴

NOTES

1. Much of this Introduction comes from the pages of my biography of Bond, Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). Part of this introduction is also based on my article, "Horace Mann Bond’s Negro Education in Alabama," History of Education Quarterly 27 (Fall 1987): 363–77. I gratefully acknowledge permission from the University of Georgia Press and the History of Education Quarterly to re-use those materials in this introduction.

2. Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1934).

3. Materials documenting Bond’s difficulty in arranging publication are in the Horace Mann Bond papers at the University of Massachusetts Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. See Bond to Charles H. Thompson, July 28, 1936, Bond Papers, Series 2, Box 8, Folder 6A [hereafter cited as Bond Papers with an Arabic numeral for the box number, another Arabic numeral for the series number, and a third Arabic numeral (sometimes with a capital letter added) for the folder number]; Lawrence Reddick to Bond, December 4, 1936, Bond Papers, 4, 89, 13D; Bond to Gordon J. Laing [University of Chicago Press], April 4 and April 28, 1938, Bond Papers, 6, 177, 44; George A. Works to Bond [on the prize given to the dissertation], June 1, 1937, Bond Papers, 3, 86, 389B.

4. Carter G. Woodson to Bond, July 12, 1938, and Bond to Woodson, July 16, 1938, both in Bond Papers, 6, 177, 44; and Woodson to Bond, April 22, 1939, Bond Papers, 4, 179, 60. Woodson is comprehensively described and evaluated in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986): 1–71.

5. Bond was a partner in research conducted for the Rosenwald Fund by Clark Foreman, a young white man working on his doctorate at Columbia University. Foreman and Bond studied black schooling in Alabama and two other states. Foreman published the results of their studies in Environmental Factors in Negro Elementary Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932).

6. Horace Mann Bond, Two Racial Islands in Alabama, American Journal of Sociology 36 (January 1931): 552–67.

7. Horace Mann Bond, A Negro Looks at His South, Harper’s, no. 973 (June 1931): 98–108.

8. See note 2.

9. Bond, Negro Education, xi. The circumstances of Bond’s work at the Archives were described to me by his wife, Julia Washington Bond, who worked with him for long periods of time at the Archives in Montgomery.

10. Bond, Negro Education, xii.

11. Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York: Macmillan, 1905).

12. Bond to John Hope Franklin, July 10, 1958, Bond Papers, 3, 30, 79B. Interview with John Hope Franklin, October 14, 1985, Durham, North Carolina.

13. Horace Mann Bond, An Interpretation of the Contributions of William Burns Patterson, February 9, 1960, Bond Papers, 6, 172, 12.

14. Bond, Negro Education, 45. The significance of Bond’s critique of Fleming on the issue of the debt was stressed in Howard Beale’s landmark article in Reconstruction historiography, written shortly after Bond’s book was published. See Beale, Rewriting Reconstruction History, American Historical Review 45 (July 1940): 816–17.

15. See the reviews in the American Historical Review 45 (April 1940): 669–70; the American Sociological Review 4 (October 1939): 907; the Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36 (December 1939): 424–25; and the Journal of Southern History 5 (August 1939): 404–05. Also see Howard K. Beale, Rewriting Southern History.

16. Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., Reconstruction in the South (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1952).

17. Bond, Negro Education, 26; Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

18. Edgar W. Knight, Public Education in the South (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1922). For elaboration of Knight’s racism, see Clinton B. Allison, The Appealing World of Edgar Wallace Knight, Journal of Thought 18 (Fall 1983): 7–14.

19. Louis Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States (New York: Atheneum, 1968 [reprint of 1958 edition]).

20. Bond, Negro Education, 217.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 210, 255.

23. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901, Vol. 1, and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, 1983).

24. Winthrop Jordan, Foreword to J. Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in the South, 1776–1870 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 5-6.

PREFACE

Many persons have been generous with advice and assistance in the preparation of this work. This has been true since the Summer of 1930, when I began work in the Alabama Archives. Their help has continued through the preparation of the thesis, Social and Economic Influences on the Public Education of Negroes in Alabama, 1865-1930, which was accepted in 1936 by the Department of Education of the University of Chicago in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and in the preparation of that thesis for publication under the present title.

I wish to acknowledge particularly the painstaking counsel of Dr. Newton Edwards, of the Department of Education of the University of Chicago. Dr. Edwards has given much time to the manuscript while it was being prepared. His lectures, with those of Dr. Charles Hubbard Judd, first called to my attention the importance of social and economic analysis of educational institutions. In my life it has been my good fortune to know many good teachers. It is pleasant for me to be able to think of Dr. Edwards and Dr. Judd, not only as good teachers, but as very good men.

My wife, Mrs. Julia Washington Bond, spent many hours of cheerful toil in the compilation of statistical materials, and in the copying of endless notes from the materials in the Alabama Archives. I am grateful for her patience and helpful intelligence, and for her utter dependability for exact detail.

I received, among others, two kinds of financial assistance that were indispensable to the final completion of this work. Over a period of years Mr. William Mather, of the Business Office of the University of Chicago, gave me help from time to time in securing employment in various capacities in connection with the culinary establishments maintained by the University. The spiritual and physical encouragement provided by these opportunities leaves me eternally in debt to Mr. Mather.

The Julius Rosenwald Fund provided a fellowship grant under the provisions of which I studied at the University of Chicago during the year 1931-1932. The Fund has also provided a grant to make the publication of this essay possible.

The officials of various libraries have been altogether gracious. I feel a special obligation to Mrs. Marie Bankhead-Owens, of the Alabama State Department of Archives at Montgomery, and to her associates; to Dr. W. D. Weatherford, who assembled a Southern and Negro collection at the Y.M.C.A. Graduate School in Nashville that is incomparable; to Mr. Edward A. Parsons, formerly of the New Orleans Public Library; to Mr. R. G. Usher, of the Howard Memorial Library of New Orleans; and to Miss Wilhelmina E. Carothers, of the Dillard University Library of New Orleans. These persons added to the formalities of library administration a warmth in facilitating access to the sources which remains as one of the more pleasant memories of this research.

As a matter of pure sentiment, I should like to conclude these acknowledgments by referring to a Negro trusty known to me only as Amos, who was in 1930-1932 attached to the Alabama State Department of Archives at Montgomery. By now I understand that Amos has paid his debt to society, and presumably is somewhere working out his destiny as a free member of the social order. By his thorough knowledge of the materials in the Alabama Archives, and his unvarying solicitude for the comfort of my wife and of myself, Amos remains as more than a pleasant memory. He has been a constant source of inspiration in the pursuit of this study.

HORACE MANN BOND

Fisk University

January, 1939

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FORCES IN THE MAKING OF ALABAMA

The public school in Alabama is a social institution. It is the product of a variety of forces, set in motion by human beings equipped with a social heritage, and reacting to a particular kind of natural and physical environment. An understanding of the consequences of these forces requires a knowledge, comprehensive and detailed, of the forces themselves, and of their interactions.

Early settlers brought to the State diverse sets of beliefs and social habits, embodied in institutions quickly transplanted to the wilderness. The first task of this study is to appraise the kind of wilderness to which these migrants brought themselves and their social baggage. The elemental natural endowment of the land had power to direct, first, the course of settlement, and, later, the process of acculturation.

GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES

According to geological surveys the political unit we now know as Alabama consists of three major regions. The first, beginning in the North, is comprised of old formations, with the Valley of the Tennessee river merging into the uplands of the Appalachian foothills. This includes the Mineral Region and the Cahaba Coal Measures. The Southern rim of the first division is the Metamorphic Region; in common parlance, the hill country. There are two principal subdivisions to the remaining section of the State; the first is the Black Belt, or Canebrake, entering at the Eastern Georgia boundary and running across Alabama in a widening fan to the Mississippi line. The Coastal Plain begins where the rich soil of the Canebrake area ends.¹

The State has a narrow access to the Gulf. Mobile Bay afforded a port for Spanish and French settlement long before the American colonization came from the hinterland. The rivers in the State provided arteries for transportation and trade, and fertile valleys for cultivation.

The American culture that penetrated the State early in the nineteenth century was predominantly agricultural. Pioneers came in search of land to farm; the territory was a frontier that tempted because of the promise of great agricultural productivity.² Common-sense classifications recognized the fact in the division of the State into discrete sections. Miller speaks of the Cereal Belt, the Mineral Belt, the Cotton or Black Belt, and the Timber Belt—all indices to the natural products of the land.³ Boyd identifies five sections: (1) the Northern, or the Tennessee Valley, (2) the Mineral Belt, (3) the Hill Country, (4) the Black Belt, and (5) the Piney Woods.⁴ This easy progression from North to South had social as well as geographical significance.

We need, perhaps, no nicer divisions; but we cannot neglect a recent and admirable study that adds greatly to an understanding of the State and of its people. Pope⁵ divides the State regionally into ten sub-divisions, each of which is distinguished by soil and climatic conditions. The necessity, for the purposes of statistical comparison, of limiting these sub-regional boundaries to county lines, does only a minor violence to geographical precision. A brief description of these areas follows:

I. The Tennessee Valley, including seven counties in North Alabama traversed by the Tennessee River. The fertile valley was a center for cotton culture from the period of the first settlement. Present counties included are Lauderdale, Colbert, Limestone, Madison, Jackson, Morgan, and Lawrence.

II. The Upper Coastal Plain, including thirteen counties in a belt stretching from Northwest Alabama diagonally across the State, almost to Southeast Alabama. This area skirts the hill country formed by the southwestward extension of the Appalachians into Alabama. Soil and climate were responsible for establishing this area as one of small farms, in which the cotton culture predominated. Successive developments have made the area a major one for cotton cultivation at the present time. Present counties included are Franklin, Marion, Lamar, Fayette, Pickens, Tuscaloosa, Bibb, Chilton, Autauga, Elmore, Macon, Lee, and Russell.

III. The Mineral District, including three counties in North Central Alabama. Still heavily forested, this area is notable for rich mineral deposits and for a terrain unsuited to extensive agricultural operations, except in restricted valley regions. Present counties included are Winston, Walker, and Jefferson.

IV. The Sand