Black Education at Oberlin College: A Controversial Commitment

ABSTRACTThis article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.

I think it is very important for diverse members of the African American community across the country to come together at a conference like this to discuss how to provide quality education for poor and minority children in this country. I think that black education is a critical topic. However, I believe that in order to address that topic seriously we need to focus on something very different. We need to focus on improving white education. Why do I believe that? Well, for nearly fifty years, the standard approach among black educators has been to seek equal access for minority children to the existing range of educational opportunities, that is, to seek access to white education. "Equal access" of course was guaranteed by the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954--which struck down the false premise that "separate but equal" could truly be equal. However, access itself does not guarantee quality education.

Reviewed by: Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History Peter Wallenstein Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History. Edited by Roland M. Baumann. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Pp. xx, 418.) Few scholars of the American experience have explored race relations outside the South, and even fewer have examined race relations in higher education in the North or South. Written and compiled to a large extent with the Oberlin community in mind as its primary audience, Constructing Black Education nonetheless promises to make, and does in fact make, a substantial contribution to the broader subjects of higher education, and the impact of race in education on both U.S. history and the history of the North. Editor and archivist Roland M. Baumann brings to light and makes accessible some thirty documents (and fifty-six photographs) illustrating the history of the black experience—and of the institution’s experience dealing with racial considerations—at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, notable for its academic excellence, and notable too for its beginnings as an outpost of institutional abolition, a school that from early on downplayed either race or gender as a basis for exclusion, although for many years after its first half-century it bent to the broader currents of racism in American society. Each document, or cluster of documents, gets an introduction to place it in its institutional context, and each of the five chapters gets a longer essay to set the documents in their institutional and broader contexts. The editor has done his work well, albeit he leaves to others some of the placement of these documents (especially those on the nineteenth century)—and the revised history of race at Oberlin that they facilitate—in the broader context of race, higher education, and the general currents of American social, political, and cultural history. Appearing only in an endnote, for example, is a recent quotation from Dr. George Maxwell ’38—a white student with a black roommate, who switched partners at a school dance and thereby [End Page 104] earned a reprimand for mixed-race dancing—that African American students were “integrated only in the classroom” (331). Errors creep in, as when freeborn John Mercer Langston gets described as an “emancipated Virginia slave” (30). Of greater concern is the way that names make only a fleeting appearance, people whose roles and stories cry out for more sustained attention, here or in another work emphasizing Oberlin’s historical significance in the long story of race in America: Anthony Burns, Fleet Walker, Vernon Johns, or two members of the class of 1884, Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper. Oberlin had a tremendous effect on American life, from the Civil War era through the age of segregation, and we get only glimpses of that here. We also get glimpses of more recent graduates of Oberlin, and its influence on them, people who each had considerable impact in their professional lives in the second half of the twentieth century—journalist Carl T. Rowan ’47, Spelman president Johnnetta Cole ’57, historians Leslie H. Fishel Jr. ’43, August Meier ’45, and Allan H. Spear ’58. Despite the important foundational period in the middle third of the nineteenth century, fully half of the documents date from the last third of the twentieth century. That second half of the book, beginning with the chapter “Reclaiming Equal Educational Opportunity, 1960–1985,” provides the editor an opportunity to track the efforts through those years and issue a valedictory anthem pointing the way forward from the present. Oberlin College has had a history of being in the vanguard of racial progressivism in American life. And in degree it maintained such an identity, especially but not only during its first half-century. So the documents in this book, which often underscore the on-campus issues the institution and its leadership faced along the way, suggest again how challenging the nation’s interracial project really has been—and remains. [End Page 105] Peter Wallenstein Virginia Tech Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press

A renowned educator, author, activist, and scholar, Anna Julia (Haywood) Cooper (b. 1858–d. 1964) was born into slavery on 10 August in Raleigh, North Carolina, to mother, Hannah Stanley, who was enslaved to Cooper’s white father, presumably George Washington Haywood. Cooper lived 105 years, made profound contributions to Black social and political organizing, intellectual and literary history, educational theory and praxis, and Black feminist thought. From 1868 to 1877 Cooper attended St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, earning her high school diploma in 1877. That same year she married George A. C. Cooper, who died just two years later. Cooper never remarried, but she supported, at various stages in her life, at least two foster and five adopted children. Cooper earned a BA (1884) and MA (1887) both in Mathematics at Oberlin College before being recruited, in 1887, to teach at the prestigious Washington Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (or “M Street” as it was known, and renamed Dunbar High School in 1916) in Washington, DC. Throughout the 1890s Cooper rose to prominence as a celebrated author, educator, orator, scholar, and community activist, addressing audiences at numerous national and international conferences and conventions. She also worked with or helped found several community organizations, including the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, the Washington Negro Folklore Society, and the Colored Settlement House, and she served as an editor for The Southland magazine and interim editor for the “Folklore and Ethnology Column” of The Southern Workman. During this time, Cooper published the work she is most known for: her 1892 collection of speeches and essays, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South in which she delivered an incisive critique of white supremacist patriarchal power and argued for an intersectional, situated analysis of the operations of race, gender, and class. In 1901 Cooper was promoted to principal of M Street High School, a position she held until the Washington, DC, school board failed to reappoint her for refusing to teach the inferior “colored” curriculum. She spent from 1906 to 1911 teaching at Lincoln Institute in Missouri before returning to M Street where she taught until her retirement in 1930. During this time, Cooper studied at La Guilde Internationale, Paris, and enrolled from 1914 to 1917 in graduate studies at Columbia University. At sixty-six years of age, she earned her PhD from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, making her the fourth African American woman to earn a PhD and perhaps the first to do so in the field of history. In 1930 Cooper assumed the presidency of Frelinghuysen University, a collection of community schools for African American adult learners, and remained active with the school until at least 1950. Cooper continued to write and publish well into the mid-twentieth century, publishing in Paris both her translation of Le Pelerinage de Charlemagne and her dissertation, L’Attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la Révolution, contributing two essays to The Crisis and editing and privately printing Life and Writings of the Grimké Family (1951). Through efforts led largely by Black feminist scholars, Cooper is now regarded as one of the most important Black women intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooper died in Washington, DC, on 27 February 1964 at the age of 105.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern philanthropic foundations played a significant role in the development of higher education for African Americans in the South. The General Education Board (1902–60), a Rockefeller philanthropy, expended $122 million on black education through a wide-ranging programmatic agenda. The Julius Rosenwald Fund (1917–48) is best known for the rural schoolbuilding program that constructed schoolhouses, teachers' homes, and shops throughout the South during the early 1930s. A lesserknown initiative on the part of both foundations was the utilization of fellowship programs that enabled southern blacks to obtain graduate and professional education at northern institutions. This article discusses the barriers to graduate education for African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century, the characteristics of the General Education Board and Rosenwald Fund fellowship programs, and the role of the fellowship programs in building the institutional competence of black colleges and universities.

STEM Fellowship’s High School Big Data Challenge is an inquiry-driven experiential learning program that provides students an opportunity to learn and apply the fundamentals of data science – a crucial skill set for a young researcher in the digital age – through independent research projects. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted high school education, at the same time creating a “fertile ground” for interdisciplinary, student-driven STEM education. This year, we invited students to explore issues of Equality and Equal Access in Education and to suggest their own evidence-based solutions, using Open Data and the principles of Open Science. Students explored many topics, ranging from using machine learning to find hidden socioeconomic factors in access to education, to the efficacy of various modes of instruction. We developed in-depth learning modules designed to lead the student from zero-knowledge to an elementary working proficiency in data science. The students learn a broad range of data analytics tools and programming languages which are useful for uncovering hidden patterns, trends in structured and unstructured data. Some of the tools the students learnt and used includes Python, R, LaTeX, and machine learning. On behalf of the STEM Fellowship, we extend our sincere congratulations to all students who participated in the challenge, and wish them the best for their future endeavours. We want to express our appreciation to all the mentors and volunteers. This program would not be possible without patronage of CC UNESCO and generous support of our sponsors: RBC Future Launch, Let’s Talk Science, Digital Science, Kimberly Foundation, SCWST, CISCO Academy, Canadian Science Publishing, Faculty of Science UofC. It has been a privilege for us to witness the analytical capabilities of the next generation of students firsthand, and we are certain all entrants will continue to demonstrate excellence in their respective careers.

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization

THIS is the first of two articles on the small college band which have been written for the Music Educators Journal at the request of the Committee on Public Relations of the College Band Directors National Association, an Associated Organization of the Music Educators National Conference. Mr. Whear is director of instrumental music at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio. The second article will deal with the band in the small tax-supported college and will appear in an early issue. Chairman of the CBDNA committee on public relations is Arthur L. Williams, The Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College, Ohio.

We present a look at what it is like to be a professor at a small college: one professor at Grinnell College, one at Oberlin College, and one at Whitman College.

Before his execution in 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown wrote a series of prison letters that – along with his death itself – helped to cement the abolitionist aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom. This article charts the adaptation of that aesthetic in antilynching protest literature during the decades that followed. It reveals Brown's own presence in antilynching speeches, sermons, articles, and fiction, and the endurance of the emancipatory martyr symbol that he helped to inaugurate. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, black and white writers imagined lynching's ritual violence as a crucifixion and drew upon the John Brown aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom, including Frederick Douglass, Stephen Graham, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, black Baptist ministers, and black educators and journalists. Fusing martyrdom and messianism, these antilynching writers made the black Christ of their texts an avenging liberatory angel. The testamentary body of this messianic martyr figure marks the nation for violent retribution. Turning the black Christ into a Brown-like prophetic sign of God's vengeful judgment, antilynching writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries warned of disaster, demanded a change of course, challenged white southern notions of redemption, and insisted that African Americans must reemancipate themselves and redeem the nation.

Solidarity and equal access are twin principles in the Dutch health care system: solidarity between the rich and poor and among people with high and low risks formally guarantees equal access to health care services. However, in the past few years government policies, guided by the ideology of market reform and free choice, have resulted in patterns of inequality that favour privately insured over sickness fund insured. In the meantime, the level of public support for the principles of solidarity and equal access is dropping. A significantly larger portion of the Dutch people now believes that it would be too costly to grant everyone the right to all medical treatments possible. An important reason for the decline of solidarity and equal accessibility is the scarcity of resources. The scarcity of resources and the waiting lists resulting from it will reduce the extent of the benefits package and the access to the care services of the health system. The better‐off will have the resources to receive care services that are not part of the basic package. Moreover, the scarcity of resources will affect the readiness in society to provide informal care. Opposed to the compulsory macro solidarity of the health insurance system, informal care is based on a voluntary kind of solidarity in which personal choice plays an important role. Waiting lists and diminishing professional support weaken this readiness, as such support is a necessary condition for informal carers to keep caring for their relatives and friends. Because the informal care system is a necessary supplement to the formal system of care, the lack of help offered by the latter will in the end endanger the solidarity not only in informal care, but in the institutional care system as well.

Rosenberger’s Unexplored History Rachael E. Jones (bio) Introduction Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Virginia (1995), decided by the Supreme Court a quarter-century ago,1 addressed a key tension in the religious liberties doctrine. The case represented the collision of two lines of cases. “No Aid” cases such as Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)2 stood for the premise that funding of religion is explicitly prohibited. A conflicting line of “Equal Access” cases, beginning with Widmar v. Vincent (1981),3 stood for the proposition that the government could not exclude religious groups from open forums. Rosenberger, a challenge brought by a student at the University of Virginia, answered which line of cases would win out in this clash. Not only did Rosenberger dictate that the Equal Access cases would trump the No Aid cases, but it also extended the conclusions of the Equal Access cases. Rosenberger, for the first time, announced that the neutrality principle of equal access to resources extended not only to facilities but also to public funding. This is a crucial allowance, and reflections of this expansion can be seen in recent cases. Rosenberger also represents an important part of doctrinal trends in the religion context. As a whole, funding cases represent an area in which there has been a fair amount of doctrinal convergence, largely on the principle of neutrality.4 Rosenberger foreshad-owed this rise of the principle of neutrality. Rosenberger is also a turning point in the predominant doctrinal pivot from the position in early cases in which the key question was “to what extent is the state forbidden from supporting religion” to a point in which the key question is now “to what extent is the state required to support religion.”5 Rosenberger therefore represents an interesting inflection point as an early case asking essentially the latter question. The case is likewise a salient and early example of a trend toward a steady “unraveling” of limits on aid.6 On Shifting Ground: The Landscape Pre-Rosenberger The doctrinal framework and litigation strategy that led to Rosenberger originated years earlier. The case beginning the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence in earnest was announced in [End Page 107] 1947. Everson v. Board of Education involved public funds being spent on reimbursement for busing children to parochial schools.7 Justice Hugo L. Black, writing for the Court, discussed the inherent tension at issue: first, the state is bound by a no-aid principle, but at the same time, religious individuals cannot be excluded from receiving general public benefits. The Court’s jurisprudence has developed considerably since then, but the concerns at stake in Everson inform questions still at issue today.8 While Everson marks the beginning of modern Establishment Clause jurisprudence, the specific line of cases leading up to Rosenberger began with Widmar v. Vincent. In Widmar, the University of Missouri prevented a religious group from meeting in University buildings. The district court upheld the restriction, finding that it was required by non-establishment principles.9 The Supreme Court ruled against the University, holding that once it had created a forum that was “generally open to student groups,” excluding the religious group was impermissible content-based discrimination.10 Widmar created a model litigation strategy for plaintiffs, and this basic structure would be repeated in a line of cases christened the “Equal Access” cases, including Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, Rosenberger, and Good News Club v. Mil-ford Central School. The Widmar formula involved challenging a public institution’s restriction on the use of its resources or facilities by raising a free speech challenge to exclusion from a public forum. Lamb’s Chapel, another installment in this line, followed blueprint. There, New York law allowed local districts to regulate after-hours use of schools but prohibited use for religious purposes.11 An evangelical church that was denied access challenged the regulation. As in Widmar, the district court upheld the regulation on Establishment Clause grounds, and as in Widmar, the Supreme Court held that the exclusion of the religious group was an impermissible violation of free speech principles.12 However, the principles of this line of cases were in some...

BackgroundWhen today’s efforts to achieve universal health coverage are mainly directed towards low-income settings, it is perhaps easy to forget that countries considered to have universal, comprehensive and high-performing health systems have also undergone this journey. In this article, the aim is to provide a century-long perspective to illustrate Sweden’s long and ongoing journey towards universal health coverage and equal access to healthcare.MethodsThe focus is on macro-level policy. A document analysis is divided into three broad eras (1919–1955; 1955–1989; 1989–) and synthesises seven points in time when policies relevant to overarching goals and regulation of universal health coverage and equal access were proposed and/or implemented. The development is analysed and concluded in relation to two egalitarian goals in the context of health: equality of access and equal treatment for equal need.ResultsOver the past century, macro-level policy evolved from the concept of creating access for the neediest and those reliant on wages for their survival to a mandatory insurance with equal right to healthcare for all. However, universal health coverage was not achieved until 1955, and individuals had to rely on their personal financial resources to cover the cost at the time of care utilization until the 1970s. It was not until 1983 that legislation explicitly stated that access to healthcare should be equal for the entire population (horizontal equity), while a vertical equity-principle was not added until 1997. Subsequently, ideas of free choice and privatization have gained significance. For instance, they aim to increase service access, addressing the Swedish health system’s Achilles’ heel in this regard. However, the principle of equal access for all is now being challenged by the emergence of private health insurance, which offers quicker access to services.Conclusions: brief summary and potential implicationsIt can be concluded that there is no perpetual Swedish healthcare model and various dimensions of access have been the focus of policy discussion. The discussion on access barriers has shifted from financial to personal and organizational ones. Today, Sweden still ranks high in terms of affordability and equity in international comparisons: although not as well as a decade ago. Whether this marks the beginning of a new trend intertwined with a decline in Sweden’s welfare ‘exceptionalism’, or is a temporary decline remains to be assessed in the future.

Fanny Jackson Coppin was a prominent educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born a slave in Washington, DC, in 1837, her freedom was purchased by a devoted aunt when she was thirteen. She moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where she worked as a servant in the mansion of the Calverts, descendants of Lord Baltimore and Mary Queen of Scots. From 1860 to 1865, Coppin attended Oberlin College in Ohio. When she graduated in 1865, she was the second known Black woman college graduate in the country. Upon graduating, she became a teacher and later principal of the Quaker-founded private classical high school in Philadelphia, the Institute for Colored Youth, working there for thirty-seven years. Under Coppin’s leadership, the school became renowned for its high academic offerings and outstanding students. This chapter discusses her philosophy of education and race.