Janie Porter Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls: Community Response to the Needs of African American Children

Abstract

Virginia will not forget that she is indebted to the colored women of the Commonwealth for the Industrial Home School. [Davis 1920: 362]Historically, African American child welfare services have evolved as a response to exclusion, differential treatment, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression [Billingsley & Giovannoni 1972; Smith 1991; Stehno 1988]. Internal social reform and selective services for African American children have resulted from mutual aid-oriented responses on the part of African American churches and voluntary associations, and benevolence originating from interracial cooperation, the work of Caucasian philanthropists, and governmental sponsorship. The Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, founded in 1915, was initially maintained by the Virginia Federation of Colored Women's Clubs through organized interracial cooperation. Existing today as the Barrett Learning Center, this institution responded to dependent and delinquent African American girls and exemplifies the fulfillment of one of the national directives of the National Association of Colored Women. Using guiding principles from educational theory and from the Child Welfare Department of the Russell Sage Foundation (forerunner of the Child Welfare League of America), the Virginia Industrial School, under the leadership of Janie Porter Barrett, provided convincing reform by means of a humanistic living and learning environment and preparation for transition to the community [Davis 1920: 358].Child Welfare Work and the African American CommunityBetween 1877 and 1900, the status of African Americans was being socially redefined [Ogbu 1978]. In general, conditions for impoverished African American children in the South were deplorable. Emancipation resulted in the problem of who would care for dependent African American children. African American children were excluded from any meaningful and structured governmental care aside from the in-home services offered to former slave families by a few pre-Civil War private orphanages [Billingsley & Giovannoni 1972: 27-33], the orphanages established by the short-lived Freedman's Bureau, and almshouses. Mutual aid organizations and voluntary associations or self-help efforts became the dominant mode of care for dependent African American children immediately after emancipation and beyond [Billingsley & Giovannoni 1972]. African American status was based on separation laws and customs between 1900 and 1930 [Ogbu 1978], and the existing governmental child welfare system was not adequately responding to the needs of African American children.The child-saving activities of the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries led to the establishment of industrial schools and other institutions primarily for the care of poor Caucasian immigrant children who were dependent, abused, neglected, or delinquent. For the most part, African American children were not the focus of this early crusade for children. Although the juvenile court system was established as early as 1899, the practice of putting African American children in jail persisted in many communities well into the twentieth century. In 1976 in Virginia, for example, 75 years after the practice was prohibited by state law, a large number of children under age 15 were still being jailed, generating community concern [Child Jailings Decline...1976]. As segregation customs and laws persisted, young dependent African American children were either jailed or sent to reform schools even when not delinquent because communities were slow to respond to the need for homefinding and family foster care services for African American children.During the early decades of the twentieth century, voluntary associations founded by African American women began to confront the unmet needs of African American children and youths. Kindergartens, day nurseries, and schools for dependent and delinquent African American children were developed in response to the racial uplift mandates emanating from the philosophy of the National Association of Colored Women. …