Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell

Abstract

Bell’s remarkable book examines racial politics at three “abolitionist colleges” that offered interracial education in the nineteenth century—Oberlin College, Berea College, and the short-lived New York Central College (1848–1860), which was the most radical of the group. These schools were among the institutions in the United States most committed to multiracial democracy. According to Bell, although the schools were run largely by white men, the Black students were the ones continually pushing the colleges to honor their commitment to universal human equality. These colleges emerged when racist violence and prejudice were spreading and hardening in both the North and South. Black students also faced challenges on these supposedly enlightened campuses. The most progressive white allies were not immune to fears of amalgamation—interracial mixing—which clearly showed limits in white egalitarian thinking. As in the abolitionist movement generally, white paternalism and its emphasis on racial uplift also worked against the universalist equality that Black men and women advanced. Even white college leaders’ particular understanding of equality, as about opportunity and individual liberty, “could make whites oblivious to the continued significance of race” at these colleges (89). Ultimately, as Bell puts it, whites in these college “communities were more comfortable reforming specific racial injustices than reimagining race itself” (10).This shortsightedness had profound effects on the schools’ trajectories following the Civil War. Bell documents in incredible detail how practices of interracial sociability and exchange broke down at Berea and Oberlin. College officials no longer enforced social equality on campus. Students could choose to associate closely with students of other races—or not. Prior historians explain this declension as part and parcel of the emergent Jim Crow regime. Bell offers a more satisfying explanation. The pre-existing limitations of white collegians and college leaders’ egalitarian thinking, coupled with the feeling that they had won the big struggle—abolishing slavery—produced indifference to their institutions’ historic missions. Many whites at abolitionist colleges came to accept contemporary Darwinian ideas of social evolutionism, namely that humans developed in stages and that Black people were simply at an earlier stage. This notion deviated dramatically from the ideal of equality that Black students championed.Degrees of Equality is a mode of social and cultural history based on impeccable archival research. Bell mined student writings, institutional sources, public accounts of the colleges, and records of extracurricular groups to great effect, all of it allowing Bell to ground his arguments in evocative descriptions of students’ lived experience. Better still, Bell situates his case studies not only in the histories of race and higher education in the nineteenth century but also in sociological debates about how to foster egalitarian communities. Bell explicitly addresses how his study speaks to “contact theory,” which examines how intergroup interactions can challenge prejudice and produce shared feeling. He lends support to sociological critiques of color-blindness, which often sustain prejudice and inequality, as Bell shows that it did in the postbellum years. Chapter 3 draws especially well from sociological theory. By reading the experiences of four Oberlin alumnae in light of Black feminist scholarship, Bell uncovers the many subtle ways in which the college and abolitionists continued to indulge prejudice, and why radical challenges to these practices were so necessary.Bell ends by suggesting that this history offers much to modern university administrators, as they try to create racially egalitarian spaces on campuses. Degrees of Equality shows how deep and careful historical research can speak to larger interdisciplinary conversations within the present moment. This book demands the attention of historians of American education, abolition, and race in the nineteenth century.