Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt.

Abstract

Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt, by William J. Edwards. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993. (originally published 1918). 143 pp. $16.95, paper. Reviewed by Michael Fultz, University of Wisconsin-Madison. How are we to interpret the activities and the social vision of those African Americans, both men and women, who openly and sometimes proudly bore the banner of industrial education during the opening decades of the twentieth century? Were they the Uncle Toms of their generation, unctuous and sycophantic accommodators willing to sell out their race for the meager favors of White southern politicians and northern philanthropists? Or, were they sincere Black educator-activists who, working within the confines of an unbelievably racist system, struggled in myriad ways to uplift their communities? In either case, how much of the verbal support for industrial education was absolute, fundamentally excluding more academic and literary training, and how much was a matter of higher priorities given to one or the other? Or, indeed, how much of the verbal support for industrial education was mere lip-service, realistically acknowledging that any educational reform for African Americans would at least have to wear the mask of industrial education in order to placate a virulent White South which actively sought to stifle any possible opportunity for Black educational attainment? All of these questions are highly relevant to a consideration of William J. Edward's recently republished 1918 autobiographical narrative, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt. Edwards founded the Snow Hill Colored Literary and Industrial Institute in Wilcox County, Alabama, in 1893, one of many little Tuskegees developed in the rural South during the period from 1880 to 1920. In Edwards's case, as in many others, Snow Hill's resemblance to the famous Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute was no accidentin 1904 the school was renamed Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute. Edwards was a member of Tuskegee's class of 1893 and his tale frequently praises its controversial leader Booker T. Washington. In many ways a Washington protege, Edwards missed the anguish of by a mere four years, but from his birth in 1869 his life story parallels that of the famous Tuskegeean, displaying a spirited resolve to move up from adversity, if not actually up from slavery itself. Similarly, Edwards repeatedly notes his passionate desire to serve the educational and social needs of rural southern African Americans through-as his Tuskegee class motto proclaimed-Deeds Not Words. On one level, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is a story of individual determination and perseverance. Although he is not a particularly compelling writer, Edwards must nevertheless be credited with overcoming a crippling bone disease (scrofula), and with surmounting the meager circumstances of his tenant farming upbringing in order to follow his dream of going to school and eventually establishing a school for other impoverished African Americans in rural Alabama. One of the strong points of the book is Edwards's matter-of-fact description of the conditions facing African Americans in the rural 19thcentury South. …