"Being in the Field of Education
and Also Being a Negro . . . Seems . . . Tragic": Black Teachers in
the Jim Crow South

Adam Fairclough

"Teachers, you are the shapers of thought and the molders of sentiment, not of this age and of this generation alone, but of ages and generations to come. You are making history by those you teach. . . . You are the few that are moulding the masses." This ringing exhortation by Rev. G. M. Elliott to the 1888 meeting of the Alabama State Teachers Association (ASTA) typified the missionary fervor that teachers brought to their work in the nineteenth century. For black teachers, education brought the added duty of dispelling the ignorance, immorality, and superstition that, many believed, slavery had bequeathed to the race—of leading and elevating a benighted people. Elliott, president of the ASTA, reinforced the point the following year: "What the Negro in America is to be, and what the Negro in Africa is to be, and in short what the Negro in the world is to be, we are called to be instrumental in deciding."1	1
The people in the forefront of the struggle for education played a critical role in defining, articulating, and advancing the aspirations of the race. Mass illiteracy among the freedmen made teachers a natural source of race leadership, and the organization of schools helped blacks define themselves as communities. Scholars such as Betty Mansfield and James D. Anderson have demonstrated the importance of black teachers and black initiatives in founding freedmen's schools, redressing the overemphasis of previous historians on the work of northern white missionaries. Northern-educated blacks such as John Oliver, Thomas DeSaille Tucker, and John Wesley Cromwell began teaching in the missionary schools of Union-occupied Virginia as early as 1862. In the same year Clement Robinson, a graduate of Lincoln University, set up Virginia's first "normal school" for the training of black teachers. No sooner was Savannah liberated than blacks formed the Savannah Education Association, which swiftly raised eight hundred dollars and founded several schools. "It is wholly their own," noted Rev. John W. Alvord. "The officers of the Assoc. are all colored men. The teachers are all colored." In the rural areas, black people organized "freedmen's schools" and "Sunday schools," acting independently of northern whites. Black teachers outnumbered white ones very soon after the Civil War.2	2
When black men gained the vote, teachers provided political leadership. During Reconstruction, teacher-politicians such as Thomas W. Cardozo, Jonathan C. Gibbs, and James Walker Hood rose high in the ranks of the Republican party. After Reconstruction black teachers formed state associations that quizzed political candidates, lobbied state legislatures, and took positions on the leasing of convicts to private employers, temperance, and other issues of the day. Teachers in the New South continued to be involved in party politics and some, such as Charles N. Hunter, Ezekiel E. Smith, and Richard R. Wright, held federal patronage jobs. Even after disfranchisement, black teachers strove for, and often attained, positions of community leadership. Along with ministers, they enjoyed prestige and wielded influence.3	3
The respect accorded teachers reflected the high value that blacks placed upon education. A determination to acquire formal knowledge has been one of the most striking features of the black struggle for equality. Slaves' clandestine efforts to understand the written word, the establishment of freedmen's schools during and after the Civil War, Booker T. Washington's crusade for "industrial education," the school-building campaign stimulated by the Rosenwald Fund, the fight for equalization and then integration of public schools led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—all were part of a constantly changing but constantly waged struggle. In every period of their history in America, blacks knew that literacy and learning were essential to their freedom.4	4
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