Higher Ambitions for Freedom: The Politics of Public Black Colleges in the South, 1865-1915

Soares, Leigh Alexandra

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-bjjh-g111

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Higher Ambitions for Freedom: The Politics of Public Black Colleges in the South, 1865-1915

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During the 1870s and 1880s, state governments in the former slaveholding South established eleven public institutions for black higher learning. Given the volatile, impoverished, often repressive climate of the region, how did black political and educational leaders mobilize to expand state support for black higher education? Furthermore, how did they sustain these institutions through the onset of Jim Crow? Using research from twenty archives, this dissertation provides a region-wide study of black public higher education from 1865 to 1915. It argues that, during Reconstruction, black leaders leveraged expanding definitions of citizenship and welfare to demand southern states’ support for black higher education. Southern state governments consistently underfunded higher education, especially for black students, and conservative white officials sharply constrained how public black colleges developed. Yet, as this dissertation shows, school leaders had some space to set goals for their institutions that exceeded the state’s narrow vision. By advocating for public colleges, black leaders claimed not only a material share of state educational resources, but also public recognition of their diverse intellectual ambitions. This project takes seriously their turn to state governments for support in the late nineteenth century, explaining why public education was an issue that could garner some interracial cooperation, even among white conservatives. Black leaders worked strategically in state legislatures, administrative offices, and local communities to ensure that public black colleges did grow and even, in some cases, flourish in the half century after the Civil War. In the early postwar years, public black colleges’ close relationship to state governments allowed black officeholders and educators to influence public policy and exercise their organizational acumen. That relationship strained but did not break during the resurgent political dominance of white conservatives. Instead, black college presidents self-consciously navigated their schools through the late nineteenth century, forging unlikely alliances with white officeholders from across the political spectrum and in every level of government. Even as openings for formal black political power in the South closed between 1890 and World War I, black leaders used these colleges as tools of racial uplift and sites of resistance to Jim Crow. Recovering the early history of public black colleges and the people who shaped them helps us better understand how southern black leadership and institution building developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the political importance of these colleges comes into view, we can recognize them as sites of savvy, albeit uneven, black public engagement across eras of vulnerable freedoms.

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