Teacher Training and African American Education in the South, 1900-1940

Abstract

The colored school is run and governed by town council. They are to furnish but do little. We have a very small house with seven windows and one door. The furniture, 1 table, 2 chairs, 1 stove, 3 common size blackboards, 1 clock, and a chart. The people are about all farmers. We have eighty nine (89) students.... We have two teachers. I get $20. The assistant gets $15. The school runs eight calendar months, which is divided into two terms, spring and fall.... We work very hard for upbuilding of our colored race. Neither one of us know very much, but we are teaching. We are both home girls, and are teaching home, though we have but very little education. (DuBois, 1901, p. 102) In many ways this description, offered as part of testimony from country teachers in W. E. B. DuBois's 1901 Atlanta University Study on the Negro common school, presents a typical scenario of African American education not only at turn of century but for many years thereafter. The school term in this particular setting was unusually long; much more common were divided three- to six-month annual terms begrudgingly provided Black students. But indifference of local school board, lack of adequate materials (it is likely that blackboards mentioned were either stretched oilcloth, beaverboard, or simply wooden squares painted black), overcrowded conditions in a small facility, and low salaries, were all dominant characteristics of Black schooling prior to World War II (Caliver, 1933a). Unexceptional, too, was declaration of teaching as service to race, for this was a prevalent theme among African American educators. The frank admission of insufficient academic and pedagogical training was likewise common. Both well-known sociologist Charles S. Johnson and George Gore, a longtime activist in Tennessee Black teachers' association, pinpointed such community inbreeding as a key factor impeding improvement of African American education (Johnson, 1930, p. 241; Gore, 1940, p. 93). Home girls with limited academic skills and even less classroom training, teaching in local Black schools they formerly attended, were an all-too-frequent feature in rural South, as were paltry salaries. As both Johnson and Gore noted, outsiders were not attracted to such communities because of low pay; even if they were somehow interested in taking teaching position, most could not afford to board with local residents. The overall effect, as Johnson commented, was creation of a vicious circle that kept African American education trapped in patterns of underachievement. In his words, These poorly trained teachers ... will inflict accumulated deficiencies of system in which they have been trained upon their pupils, and so perpetuate (p. 243). The intent of this article is to investigate issue of African American teachers' academic and pedagogical training during period from 1900 to 1940, highlighting dimensions of problem and African American educators' perspectives on many interrelationships involved. During these years, topic of insufficient teacher training was perhaps second only to discriminatory salaries as a subject of concern and commentary among those troubled about current state and future prospects of African American education. Moreover, like problem of low pay, training issues were associated with a wide variety of related concerns such as hiring practices, certification patterns, and social context of rural Black schooling, particularly racist underdevelopment of African American education in South. Low levels of preservice preparation among African American teachers was a refrain so often repeated that it approached level of stereotype. Its corollary, efforts to achieve a sound and thorough professionalism, likewise became clarion call for Black teachers' organizations and basis of accusations of state-sanctioned apathy and neglect. …