The debate over African-American industrial education, 1901-1914 : post-revisionist historical case study

This investigation presents a post-revisionist interpretation of the debate over African-American industrial education in the early twentieth century. Building on the excessively laudatory accounts of the traditional/liberal interpretation and the narrow ideological bias of the New Left revisionist historians, it establishes an historical perspective which transcends the limitations of both schools of thought.

Primary sources for this study were the seventeen years of published Proceedings of the Conference for Education in the South(1898-1914), which establish the Progressives' rationale for African-American Industrial Education. Also included are the editorial positions and general reactions of three Midwestern black newspapers to this special curriculum for African Americans during the period of the campaign for an educational awakening in the South, the southern education movement, 1901-1914. The respective newspapers in this study are the conservative Freeman of Indianapolis, and the radical Cleveland Gazette and Chicago Broad Ax.

Contrary to radical revisionist interpretation, this study concludes that staunch defenders of black rights did not view industrial education as part of a conspiracy to re-enslave African Americans. The antagonism of The Broad Axand The Gazettewas directed against Booker T. Washington, the foremost black proponent of industrial education, but not against the industrial curriculum per 56. It was Washington's accommodation of racism and his failure to aggressively defend African-American civil and political rights, not his cause, industrial education, that engendered the hostility of The Broad AxandThe Gazette.