Tuskegee Institute Research Articles

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

Review: Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, by Andrew E. Barnes

Review: Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, by Andrew E. Barnes

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The Messenger Years, 1923-1924

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The <i>Messenger</i> Years, 1923-1924

The Quest for Education: Racism, Paradox, and Interest Convergence in the Life of George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver is known primarily for his life and work at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This historical research provides insight prior to that time and into his journey from Missouri to several towns in Kansas, and then to Iowa. The intersection of race, education, and philanthropy combined to guide the culmination of his life’s work—in concert with interest convergence.

Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White

Reviewed by: Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White Greta de Jong Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. By Monica M. White. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 189. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4369-4.) Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement traces the roots of contemporary food justice activism to black intellectual traditions and agricultural practices dating to the colonial era. As Monica M. White shows, African Americans’ relationship to the land was not defined solely by the oppressions inflicted by slavery and sharecropping. Agriculture was a site of struggle where black people pursued goals of economic and political empowerment and fought to overturn racist structures that were designed to keep them powerless and poor. This history has largely been ignored in popular portrayals of the local and organic food movement, which is often cast as a form of food snobbery practiced by status-conscious white people who shop at Whole Foods. In fact, the origins of this movement lie in the civil rights movement and earlier struggles for justice by African Americans. White notes that landownership and food production were central to black conceptions of freedom, from the gardens tended by enslaved people to supplement their diets, through the self-sufficiency and self-determination advocated by Marcus Garvey, to the black-owned farms, grocery stores, and restaurants established by Black Power advocates in the 1960s to supply African American communities with healthy food. Booker T. Washington’s training programs for farmers at Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver’s pioneering research into organic farming techniques, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s promotion of cooperative business models that provided alternatives to capitalist exploitation receive sustained attention for their contributions to strategies of “collective agency and community resilience (CACR),” a theoretical framework that White offers as a way to understand all of the activities described in the book (p. 5). Using archival records, interviews, and newspaper sources, White analyzes four cooperative projects that enacted CACR in the late twentieth century. Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer founded Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1967, providing employment, affordable housing, and training to members who saw clear connections between financial independence and the ability to exercise their political rights in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where white supremacists used economic reprisals to retaliate against African Americans who registered to vote. Similar motivations and strategies characterized the North Bolivar County Farmers Cooperative in neighboring Bolivar County, Mississippi. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives deployed CACR on a regional level, helping organize, finance, provide technical assistance, and train participants in cooperatives throughout the South from the late 1960s to the present. The descendants of southern migrants to Detroit, Michigan, including many who had participated in the civil rights and Black Power movements, formed the [End Page 232] Detroit Black Community Food Security Network in 2006 after deindustrialization, white flight, and disinvestment left the city with only one remaining large chain grocery store. The case studies demonstrate how rural and urban social justice activism were connected, as African Americans responded to mass unemployment and poverty caused by the loss of agricultural jobs in the South and factory jobs in the North. Writing consciously with an eye on the uses of the past for understanding the present and influencing the future, White recovers the lost stories of black activists who worked to ensure access to adequate and nutritious food for low-income communities, promoted alternatives to capitalist economic exploitation, and demanded a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. Scholars of African American history, agricultural history, and urban history will find much value in this book. Additionally, the brief length and clear writing style make Freedom Farmers ideal for classroom use. Greta de Jong University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Albert Murray’s The Spyglass Tree and the 1923 Armed Defense of Tuskegee Institute

In Albert Murray’s novel The Spyglass Tree (1991), which is set in a town similar to Tuskegee, Alabama and at a college similar to Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, the protagonist hears a tale in a barbershop of how the campus community defended itself from the Ku Klux Klan in the previous decade. The protagonist uses this story, which is an approximately accurate re-telling of the historical defense of Tuskegee Institute from the Klan in 1923, as a model for heroic action. Murray thus revisits a theme from his first novel, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), in which the same protagonist learns to appreciate and be guided by African American vernacular traditions and published forms of discourse in equal measure.

Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South by Brent J. Aucoin

Reviewed by: Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South by Brent J. Aucoin David E. Alsobrook Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South. By Brent J. Aucoin. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. 248 pp. $54.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1913-7. Thomas Goode Jones (1844-1914) was one of Alabama's most influential, enigmatic public figures of the New South Era. Utilizing a rich array of primary and secondary sources in this ambitious, incisive biography, Brent J. Aucoin vividly reveals the panoramic arc of Jones's life and times and his distinguished service as a soldier, lawyer, politician, and jurist. As a biography and historical monograph, Aucoin's much-anticipated work will be of keen interest to a wide audience of readers. Historians, attorneys, and casual aficionados of the Alabama saga will discover some familiar topics in this book—the postbellum Bourbon Democratic political agenda, the rise of populism in the 1880s and 1890s, the bitterly contested gubernatorial elections of 1890-92, the tumultuous constitutional ratification campaign of 1901, and the protracted struggle over the regulation of railroads in [End Page 72] the early 1900s. But Aucoin also includes a wealth of fresh insights into Jones's personal life, his phenomenal relationship with Booker T. Washington, and his philosophical evolution as a public official and jurist. Like so many other young men of his generation, Jones's courage was forged in the horrific crucible of Civil War combat—as a lieutenant commanding Company K of the 53rd Alabama Infantry Regiment and as an aide-de-camp to General John B. Gordon in the Army of Northern Virginia. Wounded in his baptism under fire at Thompson's Station, Tennessee, in March 1863, Jones later saw extensive action in some of the war's bloodiest engagements, including Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. In April 1865, General Robert E. Lee ordered Jones and a small cadre of staff officers under a flag of truce to Appomattox Courthouse, where they personally witnessed the Confederate surrender. Jones's memories of battlefield carnage and its indiscriminate toll on comrades and foes alike haunted him until he died a half-century later. He emerged from the war with deep respect and admiration for his former enemies and became a vocal champion of reconciliation between the North and South two years before the end of Reconstruction and a decade prior to Henry W. Grady unveiling his famous New South Creed. In his meteoric postwar public career, Jones served as a Montgomery alderman, chief counsel of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, and governor (1890-94). During the twenty-five years after the war, he became entrenched in the state's Bourbon Democratic leadership hierarchy that espoused fiscal austerity, generous subsidies and minimal taxation for industries and railroads, and white supremacy. Yet, as Aucoin meticulously documents, Jones frequently drifted away from the Bourbon Democrats' doctrines and dogma. As a legislator, for example, he vociferously opposed the state's lucrative convict leasing system and, openly breaking ranks with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, he supported a bill that obligated railroads to pay injured workers' medical expenses. He cast the deciding vote [End Page 73] in 1886 against the Wiley Contract Bill, a cleverly drafted initiative to provide white planters with unfettered control over African American laborers. Early in his first gubernatorial term, Jones cited the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause in haranguing legislators on the legal pitfalls of withholding state appropriations for black public schools. Almost twenty years later, Jones vehemently exclaimed that the legislature's recalcitrance on this issue "was not only unconstitutional, but … wrong in principle, morals, and policy" (31). Despite Jones's seemingly enlightened positions on black educational funding and labor contracts, the author argues that "he was not a racial egalitarian or immune to the racist ideas of his day" (32). Jones, as a product of his ancestry and environment, was a racial paternalist who fervently believed that African Americans' salvation lay in segregation, industrial education, and gradual economic advancement—all under the vigilant guidance of their white superiors. Thus, both Jones and Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute's principal...

Military Aviation in the Gulf South: A Photographic History by Vincent Caire

Reviewed by: Military Aviation in the Gulf South: A Photographic History by Vincent Caire Heather M. Haley Military Aviation in the Gulf South: A Photographic History. By Vincent Caire. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. 128 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-8071-6411-2. James R. Hansen's 1989 historiographical sketch outlining the state of aviation history drew attention to the lack of engagement with other historical disciplines, including gender, social, and labor histories. Ultimately, Hansen pled with historians to ask intersectional questions that appeal to audiences in "a wider view." By the early-1990s, histories of flight focused almost exclusively on engineering advancements and the military application of flying machines. Hansen noted that, as a result, aviation history had stagnated, "wherein broadly synthetic, contextual, and interdisciplinary studies" would "explore the meaning of a particular field of history in terms of what it means to others."1 In Military Aviation in the Gulf South: A Photographic History Vincent P. Caire responds to Hansen's call for aviation history in the wider view in the most literal sense with his general and celebratory regional history of aviation that stretches across military bases in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Divided chronologically across six chapters—beginning with the Army's 1907 initiative to acquire aircraft for military use through contemporary student flight training practices at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas—Caire's monograph narrows the focus from broader national military aviation history to that of regional. The author [End Page 165] immediately establishes that this history "is not an attempt to present an encyclopedic, all-inclusive chronicle," but he encourages general appreciation and further academic research (xiii). While Hansen sought to influence an adaptive and evolving academic audience, Caire appeals to aviation "buffs" who focus on the intricate details of specific aircraft, notable pilots, and regional military bases. Hansen confirmed the necessity for such monographs like that of Caire's Military Aviation in the Gulf South because they are invaluable sources of raw information, without which "scholars would have a much harder time finding the precise data" that would "put major trends and evolutionary developments into focus."2 Hansen claims that these books typically "resemble the most esoteric treatises on ornithology" as the content on the flying machines themselves limit the narrative strictly to the fascination with aircraft, pilots, and airfields themselves, but this book does not fall into that trap.3 In addition to its value as an encyclopedic reference, Caire's book bleeds into the subdisciplines of science and technology, military history, and transportation. In relation to Alabama history in particular, Military Aviation in the Gulf South is an invaluable resource for beginning researchers seeking basic information on state and local history as it relates to aviation. Caire briefly chronicles the establishment of the Montgomery Air Intermediate Depot with the Army's purchase of Frank D. Kohn's 100-acre cotton plantation located northwest of Montgomery. In November 1922, the War Department renamed the facility Maxwell Field to honor Natchez, Alabama, native Second Lieutenant William C. Maxwell, who died in the Philippines when he purposefully crashed his aircraft into a flagpole to avoid a group of children at play. Ultimately, the Army Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) selected Maxwell as the center for development in aerial bombing, tactical operations, and aerial support that would maintain an increasing fleet of large aircraft. [End Page 166] Caire addresses cultural and social changes in military aviation with a brief dedication to the first African American primary flight school at Tuskegee Institute and the first African American advanced training programs at Tuskegee Air Field. The establishment of an equitable, albeit segregated, aviation training program for qualified African American pilot candidates was an integral change in military aviation in 1939. Upon induction into the Air Corps, squadron members were selected for fighter or bomber training where members mastered their skills in piloting, navigation, mechanics, and squadron support. Amidst Jim Crow segregation in Alabama, Caire notes, the Tuskegee Airmen initiated military desegregation by proving their capacity "to fulfill such critical responsibilities" in military aviation (52). Vincent Caire's impressive collection and precise incorporation of photographs nicely complements this encyclopedic military...

Separate Games: African American Sport Behind the Walls of Segregation ed. by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson

Reviewed by: Separate Games: African American Sport Behind the Walls of Segregationed. by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson Alex Macaulay Separate Games: African American Sport Behind the Walls of Segregation. Edited by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson. Sport, Culture, and Society. ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 272. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-017-3.) Separate Games: African American Sport Behind the Walls of Segregationtells the stories of the teams, events, and organizations that proved "integral to the development of a black national sporting culture" (p. xvi). The essays range from journalistic accounts of games and seasons to more analytical assessments of their subjects' broader societal impact. Whether tangentially, directly, or implicitly, the contributors address the economic importance of African American sport. While many track the decline of black teams and institutions in the wake of integration, they also demonstrate, with varying degrees of success, how African American sports contributed to off-the-field civil rights gains. The opening chapter on the Cuban Giants baseball team reads at times like a narrative box score, but its coverage of the numerous teams who adopted the Giants name and mascot testifies to the club's enduring cultural and economic resonance. Susan J. Rayl's account of the Harlem Rens basketball team catalogs wins and losses with a few nods to the squad's off-court standing and experiences. The Rens made ends meet during the Depression by barnstorming in different regions, including the American South. Rens player John Isaacs remembered navigating Jim Crow signs and expectations and having "to get used to the 'N' word" on these trips (p. 27). One newspaper reported minimal game-time hostility, prompting the conclusion that such contests "served as a catalyst for the integration of spectators, and eventually of teams" (p. 28). Carroll Van West's analysis of the role that the Tennessee State University [End Page 221]Tigerbelles played during the Cold War complements recent works on racialized concepts of beauty as well as older studies on the era's transformation of everyday men and women into international activists. He also stresses the personal significance of the Tigerbelles' global tours, quoting Mississippian Willye B. White, who credited such trips for introducing her to a world apart from "'cross burning and lynchings'" (p. 65). Studies of the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament, the Turkey Day Football Classic between Tuskegee Institute and Alabama State College, the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes auto race, and the East West Classic, the Negro National League's all-star game, highlight the civic celebrations that accompanied these contests. Showcasing the power, vibrancy, and talents of African American institutions and individuals, these events "served as a staging ground for politics, culture, and class in the communities they represented" (p. 93). The Turkey Day Classic did more than pit two schools against each other; it represented a clash between two different schools of thought regarding defining and achieving social equality. The game drew integrated crowds, but historian Thomas Aiello does not read too much into this fact. Indeed, as challenges to southern segregation mounted, the threat of white violence led to the cancellation of the 1960 Turkey Day Parade. Aiello reminds readers that while "sports could serve as a binding agent and a refuge from the race antagonism swirling around them, that antagonism could also seep into the function of those sports, could make them a theater for all of the broader problems in society at large" (p. 105). Todd Gould's account of the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes centers on driver and mechanic Charlie Wiggins, who rose to the top of his profession, joining other racers who ran a "dusty gauntlet, traveling from small town to small town, attempting to steer clear of large ruts, bumps, and unfriendly whites along their way cross country" (p. 120). Wiggins built extraordinary cars and engines, earning a stellar reputation among black and white drivers. He insisted on running qualifying laps in the cars he worked on, even when it violated segregation laws and customs. In Kentucky, this led to his on-track arrest for speeding, to protect him from a mob. While most of the essays rely on...

Separate Games: African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation eds by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson

Reviewed by: Separate Games: African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation eds by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson Andrew McGregor (bio) Separate Games: African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation. Edited by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 272. $39.95 cloth) The history of sports often focuses on individuals. This is especially true when discussing matters of race. The names of Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Wilma Rudolph figure prominently in stories told about the African American athletic experience. Separate Games: African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation offers a different perspective while exploring a period of sport history unfamiliar to many fans and students. Organized into three categories—teams, events, and organizations—David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson have compiled an impressive collection that demonstrates the broad range of sporting endeavors African Americans organized and competed in before the fall of the color line. The book includes essays on auto racing, bowling, golf, and tennis alongside more familiar sports such as basketball, baseball, football, and track and field. Moreover, high school, college, amateur, and professional male and female athletes, organizers, and administrators populate the volume's stories. The first four chapters offer insight into the organization, structure, and reception of black teams. They show that in spite of their haphazard barnstorming nature, black teams such as the Cuban Giants, Harlem Renaissance Big Five, and the Philadelphia Tribune Newsgirls, were remarkably popular, economically successful, and influential. The Renaissance Big Five in particular served as an important Harlem institution and as leaders during the early years of professional basketball. It found more economic success on the road, seizing on its regional appeal and expanding the Renaissance into the northeast and Midwest. Tennessee State's "Tigerbelles" track-and-field [End Page 569] team benefited from better organization and demonstrated its influence in different ways, particularly through the members that went on to join the U.S. Olympic team. Events became community institutions that reflected local histories and conflicts as well as the regional and national importance of sports to African American life. The next four chapters on the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, the East West Classic, the Turkey Day Classic, and the National Interscholastic High School Basketball Tournament demonstrate that major sporting events often functioned as social events imbued with meaning beyond the playing field. They were shaped by community leaders and reflected black pride, serving as more than an alternative to segregated white events. Indeed, the Turkey Day Classic reflected the histories of Montgomery, Alabama State University, and the Tuskegee Institute as well as their differing views on sport and respectability. The Gold and Glory Sweepstakes stemmed from a different kind of local history, rooted in exclusionary auto racing practices and a vibrant, entrepreneurial black community in Indianapolis. The final four chapters explore organizations like the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association, American Tennis Association, United Golfers Association, and the National Negro Bowling Association. Challenging the color line, providing economic opportunity, and fostering fellowship among African Americans counted among the goals of each organization. The authors outline how each group formed communities by developing tournaments, venues, and athletes. This is particularly clear in the National Negro Bowling Association, which valued women and children as an integral part of creating a family-friendly sporting culture open to athletes of all race, gender, age, and ability. Community is at the heart of many of the essays, grounding teams, events, and organizations in particular places and linking them to broader efforts by African Americans to achieve social, political, and economic equality. Relying largely on newspaper coverage and editorials from the black press, each chapter balances the aspirations [End Page 570] of leaders, athletes, and communities with the daily realties of living behind the walls of segregation. Some essays offer more analysis and new insights than others, but overall the book is cohesive and accessible. Separate Games makes an important contribution to our understanding of African American life and the history of sports. Andrew McGregor ANDREW McGREGOR teaches history and African American Studies at Purdue University. He is the founder and co-editor of the Sport in American History group blog...

"To Keep Alive the Teaching of Garvey and the Work of the UNIA": Audley Moore, Black Women's Activism, and Nationalist Politics during the Twentieth Century

"To Keep Alive the Teaching of Garvey and the Work of the UNIA"Audley Moore, Black Women's Activism, and Nationalist Politics during the Twentieth Century Keisha N. Blain (bio) "I have done everything I could to promote the cause of African freedom and to keep alive the teaching of Garvey and the work of the UNIA."1 —Audley "Queen Mother" Moore Audley "Queen Mother" Moore had fond memories of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic black nationalist leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest and most influential global black nationalist movement of the twentieth century.2 Recounting a story in a 1973 interview with the Black Scholar, Moore vividly describes the first time she heard Garvey speak in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1920: We heard that Garvey was coming to New Orleans, but the police would not allow him to speak. Garvey came and they arrested him. The people raised so much sand until they had to let him out the next night. When local police officials tried to block Garvey from speaking during the second night, Moore describes a tense scene in which she and others pulled out [End Page 83] guns in defense of Garvey's right to speak.3 She explained it this way: "I had two guns-one in my bosom and one in my pocketbook . . . Everybody was told, and everybody knew they had to come armed. We wanted that freedom." Standing with a crowd of black supporters—all with guns in the air—Moore joined the chorus of voices shouting, "Speak, Garvey, speak!"4 Moore's first encounter with Garvey that evening marked the beginning of her political journey into black nationalist and radical politics.5 In Moore's words, Garvey brought something very beautiful to us—Africa for the Africans. He made us conscious of the fact that we belong to a big continent, with all of its gold and diamonds and riches . . . That we were somebody . . . That we had a right to be restored to our proper selves.6 Amidst the social and political upheavals of the post-World War I era, many black men and women across the globe embraced Garveyism—Garvey's race-based philosophy centered on black pride, political self-determination, economic self-sufficiency, and African redemption (from European colonization). Building on the ideas of earlier black leaders—including founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, Pan-Africanist Martin Delany, and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Henry McNeal Turner—Garvey advocated a militant response to global white supremacy, calling on people of African descent to assert their political agency and demand their God-given rights.7 Millions in the black diaspora heeded Garvey's call during the 1920s. "They invested their hopes in Garveyism," historian Adam Ewing argues, "not because it offered a panacea, or even immediate relief, but because it invested their parochial politics with a diasporic identity and global vision."8 Significantly, the UNIA functioned as a political incubator in which many became politicized and trained for future leadership. During a period in which black women were generally confined to the drudgery of domestic work, Garveyism provided a sense of empowerment, and within the UNIA women found opportunities to serve in a variety of both public and private roles.9 This is not to suggest that women found equal opportunities to men, but it underscores how the organization was, in some ways, one of the most progressive black organizations of the period. Unlike many other race organizations, women in the UNIA were "well integrated into the movement's structure" and constitution.10 According to historian Ula Y. Taylor, the organization . . . went beyond [simply] carving out an auxiliary niche for women by developing a system in which each local division elected a male and female president and vice president.11 [End Page 84] In this way, the UNIA provided a space for some women to maintain visible leadership positions. This essay examines Audley "Queen Mother" Moore's engagement with Garveyism and sheds light on her political activism in the UNIA. During a period in which black women had limited access to formal politics, the UNIA provided a public platform for Moore and...

FORTY ACRES AND A CARABAO: T. THOMAS FORTUNE, NEWSPAPERS, AND THE PACIFIC'S UNSTABLE COLOR LINES, 1902–03

In late 1902, exhaustion, financial distress, and the desire for a political appointment—combined with aspirations to serve as a broker for the export of African American labor abroad—led famed African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune to secure a temporary appointment with the Roosevelt administration to investigate trade and labor in Hawaii and the Philippines. In Hawaii, Fortune was fêted by the planter class, and allied himself publicly with the educational and political philosophies of Booker T. Washington. His hopes for black emigration and land ownership, however, were vigorously opposed by most newspapers connected to the oligarchy. Hawaii's robust in-language indigenous and ethnic newspapers, meanwhile, voiced their own position on black labor. In Manila, a fiercely entrepreneurial and militaristic American press attacked Fortune. Recent scholarship ties Washington's Tuskegee Institute to a kind of “Jim Crow colonialism” abroad. An in-depth look at Fortune's journey both supports and troubles such a view. Both men hoped U.S. “expansion,” and African American participation in it, might expose not only the power of race, but also its instability and vulnerability; Fortune, in particular, saw newspapers as vital to this task.

The myth of the first African-American electrical engineer: Arthur U. Craig and the importance of teaching in technological history

In recent years, historians of technology including Bruce Sinclair, Rayvon Fouché, and Amy Slaton have analyzed the intersection of technological and African-American history to redress the historical and enduring correlation between whiteness and technology. This paper contributes to this conversation by chronicling the story of Arthur U. Craig, a faculty member at the Tuskegee Institute who installed the university’s famous lighting system. During Craig’s tenure at the Institute, he was touted to be the ‘first black electrical engineer’ – but he resisted that title. This article examines why. In so doing, ‘The Myth of the First African-American Electrical Engineer’ builds upon three scholarly conversations. First, it discusses how the cultural meanings of electricity inflected how Tuskegee advertised Craig’s contributions to campus. Second, it re-situates the often-overlooked Craig within the history of Tuskegee Institute. Finally, it examines Craig’s contribution to debates about engineering education for African American students.

The Warm Springs Story: Legacy and Legend by F. Martin Harmon

Reviewed by: The Warm Springs Story: Legacy and Legend by F. Martin Harmon Stephen E. Mawdsley The Warm Springs Story: Legacy and Legend. By F. Martin Harmon. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2014. Pp. [x], 318. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-472-6.) In The Warm Springs Story: Legacy and Legend, F. Martin Harmon, the retired public relations director at Roosevelt Warm Springs, provides a sympathetic history of his former institution, interwoven with family narratives and local lore. While David M. Burke and Odie A. Burke’s earlier work Warm Springs (Charleston, S.C., 2005) provided a visual account of the institution, [End Page 206] Harmon’s work is a much more conventional history that contributes to existing literature on polio in America. Drawing on archived institutional records and oral history interviews, Harmon argues that Warm Springs was important not only as the site of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy in polio treatment and fund-raising but also as a place of pioneering education, rehabilitation, and disability activism that inspired generations of leaders. The Warm Springs Story has eighteen chapters written in a relaxed, chatty tone. Harmon begins with a poignant case study, outlining recent political and economic challenges that faced Roosevelt Warm Springs and how it narrowly survived closure. From the contemporary, Harmon moves back in time to explore the first European settlers in Meriwether County, Georgia, and their discovery of the warm spring waters near Pine Mountain. He reveals the influence of local families and how a series of owners developed the region. The author then considers Roosevelt’s vision for the Warm Springs property after he purchased it in 1926. While exploring the architecture, ambitious resort plans, and people involved, Harmon also analyzes the polio treatment program, the development of the Warm Springs Foundation, and Roosevelt’s return to politics. Voices from the past are accentuated in biographies and interviews, which highlight the significance of the physical therapists and patients at Warm Springs. Through this intimate foray, the author interweaves compelling stories of love affairs, ghost sightings, potential espionage, and disabled models. In the last chapters Harmon expresses some disappointment at the missed opportunities to maintain, expand, and reorient Warm Springs after the conclusion of the polio crusade. However, in light of recent developments, he remains optimistic about the future of Warm Springs as a tourist destination and a historical center. The book has many strong points, especially its extensive narrative history of the institution and the rare glimpse into the lives of former employees and patients it provides. Despite its strengths, the tight focus on the institution and the author’s selection of buoyant patient narratives do not permit a nuanced analysis or larger historical connections. Indeed, while Warm Springs contributed to the development of polio therapies, the treatment innovations introduced by nurse-activist Sister Elizabeth Kenny in the 1940s reached more people and had a greater impact. Moreover, Harmon might have explored in more detail the fight to open up the institution to black patients in the context of racial segregation in the South and the complex relationship that developed between Warm Springs and Tuskegee Institute. The Warm Springs Story is an enjoyable monograph that will appeal to a broad audience, including former patients and staff, historians, and biographers. It is ultimately successful in bringing attention to an important place in an accessible manner. Stephen E. Mawdsley University of Cambridge Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson

Reviewed by: John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner by R. Bruce Stephenson Todd M. Michney John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner. By R. Bruce Stephenson. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 294. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-62534-079-5.) In this deeply researched and richly detailed biography of John Nolen (1869–1937), among the first to list his profession as “city planner,” R. Bruce Stephenson focuses attention on a figure who has been curiously understudied and who arguably deserves additional scrutiny on several topics—from his ideas about race and class to his proto-environmentalism, all key interests among Progressive reformers. Described as a “pragmatic visionary,” Nolen, in his signal contribution, translated garden city principles that originated in Great Britain for American audiences (p. 4). Nolen was previously examined in a 2011 article by Robert Freestone as a transitional figure bridging the City Beautiful and City Practical movements (“Reconciling Beauty and Utility in Early City Planning: The Contribution of John Nolen,” Journal of Urban History, 37 [March 2011], 256–77), but otherwise Nolen has mainly garnered attention in case studies of selected projects. One of the few other monographs to date is Jody Beck’s John Nolen and the Metropolitan Landscape (London, 2013), a much shorter study that Stephenson seems to have completely overlooked. Nolen left a successful first career as a promoter of adult education in 1903 to enroll in Harvard’s landscape architecture program, where he studied under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Inspiration for this move came from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and what Nolen absorbed on trips to Europe, particularly Germany, which was pioneering land-use regulation at the time. Nolen received his first commission before even completing his graduate training, and ultimately he was credited with drawing up hundreds of plans. However, his efforts to convince profit-minded developers and penny-pinching city officials to implement his elegantly organic designs typically came to naught; Stephenson’s assessment that prior to the 1920s “only about a quarter of Nolen’s city and town plans were adopted” seems overly generous (p. 158). Apart from several well-received parks and subdivisions, practically all of Nolen’s most time-consuming projects were either dramatically scaled back (Madison, Wisconsin) or ultimately rejected (San Diego; St. Petersburg, Florida). Mariemont, Ohio (a Cincinnati suburb) was Nolen’s most successful achievement, being entirely underwritten by a wealthy patron. World War I delivered new opportunities, but Florida’s land bust and the coming of the Great Depression essentially destroyed his business; thereafter, a shift toward more “scientific” planning and modernist design, not to mention his own premature death, denied Nolen the chance to fully participate in the New Deal planning revival. Despite various setbacks, Nolen was extremely well connected in the field and published prolifically, contributing to the professionalization of city planning. [End Page 961] Historians of the South will find much material of interest here, considering Nolen’s active involvement in Charlotte, North Carolina; Roanoke, Virginia; Kingsport, Tennessee; and numerous Florida cities and towns. However, Stephenson does not go nearly far enough in exploring Nolen’s views on formalized racial segregation. Throughout, the approach is to give Nolen the benefit of the doubt, emphasizing his discomfort with blatant white supremacy and highlighting his several direct encounters with African Americans—Nolen drew up a Tuskegee Institute plan, for example—while postulating that his disadvantaged childhood made him empathetic. While Stephenson does scrutinize Nolen’s occasional inclusion of segregated black settlements—most strikingly in Venice, Florida, surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of white-owned farms—he asserts these were accommodations to southern racial custom. In fact, as Jody Beck notes, on a number of occasions (and as early as 1912) Nolen personally advocated racial segregation as beneficial for African Americans. While noting race-based deed restrictions in Belleair, Florida, Stephenson neglects to mention these were also applied to Myers Park in Charlotte, as well as to Mariemont (underlining that de jure segregation was not limited to the South in this period). While representing a welcome contribution to the field, there is clearly more to be explored in John Nolen’s contributions to the field of early city...

Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics by Harry Lembeck

Reviewed by: Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics by Harry Lembeck David H. Jackson Jr Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics. By Harry Lembeck. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2015. Pp. 544. $27.00, ISBN 978-1-61614-954-3.) Although President Theodore Roosevelt is viewed as one of America’s greatest presidents, the way he handled the largely forgotten Brownsville affair has left a stain on his record. In Taking on Theodore Roosevelt: How [End Page 199] One Senator Defied the President on Brownsville and Shook American Politics, Harry Lembeck has compiled a fascinating examination of the 1906 Brownsville incident, in which black soldiers from the Twenty-fifth Infantry regiment stationed at Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas, were accused of going on a lawless rampage in retaliation for constant harassment, threats, and discrimination by local white and Mexican citizens. Unlike previous scholars, Lembeck focuses on analyzing the struggle that ensued between President Roosevelt and Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio, who took up the cause and pursued justice for the accused soldiers. Lembeck begins by introducing readers to Foraker and then briefly discussing the actual incident in Brownsville, fleshing out different, and very contradictory, eyewitness accounts. None of the soldiers accused of violence confessed, but Roosevelt believed the men were engaged in a conspiracy of silence to protect each other, supposedly a racial trait among blacks. Ultimately, when none of the soldiers confessed or named any of the alleged shooters, Roosevelt, without a hearing or a trial, dishonorably discharged three companies of black men from the military, a total of 167 soldiers. This move strained Roosevelt’s relationships with Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other prominent black leaders. Taking on Theodore Roosevelt is most brilliant when it addresses the political maneuvering and conflicts between Roosevelt, Foraker, and William Howard Taft over the incident. Chapter 17, one of the more lively chapters, describes a showdown that occurred at a Gridiron Club dinner held at the New Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Journalists, corporate magnates like J. P. Morgan and H. H. Rogers, and, of course, Roosevelt and Foraker attended the gathering. Similar to a modern-day roast, the journalists started jeering the president with songs, sketches, and searing cartoons. Although the dinner was supposed to be a lighthearted affair, it quickly degenerated into a face-off between the president and Foraker. President Roosevelt spoke first, alluding to differences he had with Foraker and using biting sarcasm and political insults. Breaching normal protocol, Foraker was asked to speak after the president and reciprocated the insults and sarcasm. Foraker received long applause after his comments, much to Roosevelt’s embarrassment. The president never forgot the incident and probably never forgave Foraker. In the end, Roosevelt became determined to ruin Foraker’s career, ensuring that the senior senator from Ohio lost his bid for reelection in 1908. Taking on Theodore Roosevelt is lengthy, but it is easy to read and flows well from beginning to end. The book consists of 544 pages with twenty-seven relatively short chapters including a prologue, epilogue, afterword, and bibliography. The author used newspapers, magazines, government documents, diaries, and personal papers as sources for the book. However, there are some points that seem out of place. For example, Lembeck’s attempt to draw parallels between contemporary times and the Roosevelt/Jim Crow era falls short. Moreover, some of Lembeck’s analysis of Booker T. Washington is platitudinous and does not consider recent scholarship on the Tuskegee Institute leader and the conflict between Washington and Du Bois. Nonetheless, this study is captivating and will be greatly enjoyed by scholars and the public, [End Page 200] particularly those interested in presidential, southern, political, African American, and military history. David H. Jackson Jr Florida A&M University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Tuskegee’s Talented Tenth: Reconciling a Legacy

If, at the turn of the twentieth century, one wished to study the group that WEB Du Bois referred to as Black America’s “Talented Tenth,” Tuskegee Institute’s campus could have served as an ideal laboratory. Still, a century after Booker T. Washington’s death, scholars remain hard-pressed to reconcile the portrait of Tuskegee primarily as a producer of a submissive black laboring class with the school’s illustrious faculty and the progressive black movements, institutions and leaders in education, politics, architecture, medicine and other professions it spawned across the African Diaspora.

Interview with Gwendolyn M. Patton

Abstract Student and civil rights worker Gwendolyn Patton tells the story of her activist life in this excerpted interview with Richard D. Benson II conducted on June 23, 2014, in Montgomery, Alabama. Patton reflects on her early involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, development as a student leader at Tuskegee Institute, and formation of the National Association of Black Students.

Head and Hands Together: Booker T. Washington's Vocational Realism

Racial uplift emerged in the aftermath of Reconstruction as a powerful philosophy of social advancement for African Americans subject to the absolute subordination and disfranchisement of Jim Crow, and it found its greatest institutional expression in the African American college. This essay posits that debates over the methods of African American higher education shaped the function of literature within black modernity. It explores how Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington transformed literature and books into instruments of a practical approach to learning through a pedagogical method he named dovetailing. The dovetailing method sought to correlate acts of reading and writing with industrial and agricultural training, instantiating an instrumental relation to literary expression that this essay terms vocational realism. Examining vocational realism as an important touchstone in African American literary history writ large repositions the canonical Washington as a figure with a more complex relation to the literary than scholars have previously discerned. Turning to curricular and institutional materials and to the writing and public addresses of Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, this essay argues that the fractious debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding the social utility of literature in the lives of black citizens established the critical, artistic, and reformist fault lines of the Harlem Renaissance.

Judge Lynch Denied: Combating Mob Violence in the American South, 1877–1950

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [I]n the years from the end of Reconstruction through the mid twentieth century, threats of extra-legal retribution were commonplace, and mobs often formed and plans were laid for Judge Lynch to hold court. It is sobering that if only the gravest threats had been successful, the South would have experienced a 49 percent increase in actual lynching events. Anti-lynching cartoon, Start the Recall of judges with This One, by W. Crawford, Puck 71, February 21, 1913, Library of Congress. The rough dimensions of southern mob violence are well known: between 1877 and 1950 the American South witnessed over 3,100 incidents of lynching in which more than 3,800 southerners died through lynch mob violence. (1) The annual toll of lynching episodes grew until the mid 1890s and then began a general decline. The overwhelming majority of victims, 84 percent, were African Americans who met their fate at the hands of white lynchers. Men were vastly more likely to be the target of Judge Lynch's vengeance, with 3.1 percent of the victims being women of either race. Although all southern states experienced lynching, Georgia and Mississippi together accounted for over one third of the victims of southern mob violence during this period. In over half of the incidents, the victim had been removed from the custody of the authorities, sometimes by force and other times through acquiescence. Most victims were hanged from trees or telephone poles and riddled with bullets, under the cover of night by relatively small numbers of vigilantes. In some notable and horrific instances, however, victims were brutalized and tortured to death in front of hundreds of spectators in broad daylight. This story of the era of the southern lynch mob has been documented, analyzed, and theorized for over a hundred years. (2) Scholars and activists have long noted that while lynchers roamed the southern landscape, they weren't always successful in meting out their form of justice. Early in the twentieth century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Tuskegee Institute, Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching kept newspaper clipping files on reported mob violence and near-lynchings, but most of their archival efforts were aimed at documenting actual lynchings, and much of their work focused on the 1920s and 1930s in attempt to promote proposed federal anti-lynching legislation. (3) In his groundbreaking book Rope & Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), Walter White noted that since the end of World War I there had been shifting public opinion against mob violence and an apparent increase in lynchings averted. In 1933 James H. Chadbourn reported on the many means by which lynchings were foiled including the use of militia to frustrate mobs, or removing threatened suspects from the local area to a safer venue. Arthur Raper provided a list of threatened lynchings for the years 1930-1933 as part of his influential study of southern mob violence. (4) Some of those thwarted lynchings were widely reported and documented. Over a two-day period in mid July 1920, a mob of over 1,000 threatened to lynch three black men accused of attacking a married white woman in Alamance County, North Carolina. (5) Initially, Sheriff C. B. Story and his deputies stalled the mob as it moved toward the jail in Graham, the county seat, but recognizing the extreme danger of the situation Sheriff Story requested that Governor Thomas W. Bickett send troops to protect the prisoners and restore order. The troops arrived the next day, armed with rifles and machine guns, and were stationed around the jail. When a smaller mob of masked men attacked, the troops opened fire, driving off the attackers with at least one killed and several wounded. (6) Even better known was the plight of the Scottsboro Boys. In March 1931, nine black Alabama teenagers were being held in the Jackson County jail on a charge of raping two white women aboard a train that ran between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama. …