White Liberals and Black Power in Negro Education, 1865–1915

Abstract

ALTHOUGH the phrase is of recent origin and has acquired ambivalent and emotional overtones, the issue is in some respects not new. Reduced to its lowest common denominator, the concept of black power means greater control by Negroes themselves of the major institutions and processes that shape their lives. During the two generations after the Civil War there were many disputes over control of the freedmen's schools and colleges founded and supported by Northern abolitionists, missionaries, and other liberals interested in advancing the Negro's status and improving race relations through education. Many Negroes desired a larger role in managing these schools; their demands produced clashes that foreshadowed some current racial controversies in the field of education. The earlier black-power drive did not aim toward a restructuring of the methods, content, or purposes of education; Negroes desired not to change the system but to achieve greater participation in it as teachers, deans, presidents, and trustees.' While retaining considerable control over the schools they had founded, white liberal educators three-quarters of a century ago began gradually to yield most faculty and administrative posts to blacks. This article will try to describe and evaluate that transition. The freedmen's aid societies of Northern Protestant churches established more than a hundred institutions of college and secondary education for Negroes after the Civil War2 (see table following text). The foremost of these societies was the American Missionary Association (AMA), organized in I846 by abolitionists protesting the lack of antislavery zeal in existing Congregational mission societies. In i86i the AMA committed most of its resources to freedmen's education; the Northern branches of the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches soon joined the effort by setting up freedmen's aid societies or adding a freedmen's department to an established home mission body. The schools founded