Progressive Education in Black and White: Rereading Carter G. Woodson'sMiseducation of the Negro

Abstract

Less than a minute into his 1931 Fisk University commencement speech, Woodson had already insulted his audience. “The large majority of Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges,” Woodson said, “are all but worthless in the uplift of their people.” With this sweeping indictment of the teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other black professionals assembled before him, Woodson proceeded to catalog the inconsistencies, shortcomings, and abject failures of “Negro education.” The result was a caustic and uncompromising litany that seemed to go on forever. Negro education, Woodson charged, clung to a defunct “machine method” based on the misguided assumption that “education is merely a process of imparting information.” It failed to inspire black students and did not “bring their minds into harmony with life as they must face it.” Theories of Negro inferiority were “drilled” into black pupils in virtually every classroom they entered. And the more education blacks received, the more “estranged from the masses” they became.