Thursday, July 8, 2010

Schools Matter: Hampton: KIPP :: White Female Missionaries: __________ ______ ____________

Schools Matter: Hampton: KIPP :: White Female Missionaries:

Hampton: KIPP :: White Female Missionaries:


Following the Civil War, white philanthropists and politicians from the North like Rockefeller, Eastman, and Carnegie were generous in their support for the industrial education model that developed at Hampton and Tuskegee to indoctrinate future black teachers in the value of hoeing, ditching, grubbing, ironing, plowing, cooking, and all the other “labors of dignity” that white America had waiting for a population recently freed to become “educated” into their continuing subjugation by white capitalists. These black teachers who had been schooled, then, in becoming complicit in their own subordination, would fan out across the South to “educate” an unsuspecting population of former slaves who identified education with the freedom struggle.

This permanent stain on our education policy past has been largely forgotten (see James Anderson’s book for an