New Negroes on Campus: St. Clair Drake and the Culture of Education, Reform, and Rebellion at Hampton Institute

Authors

Andrew Rosa, Western Kentucky UniversityFollow

Abstract

On March 15, 1925, Walter Scott Copeland, owner and editor of the Newport News Daily Press, charged that Hampton Institute was teaching and practicing “social equality between the white and negro races . . . The niggers in that institution,” he wrote, “were being taught that there ought not to be any distinction between themselves and white people.” His observation came from his wife, who was distraught after having seen a performance of the Denishawn Dancers while seated next to a black women in Hampton’s Ogden Hall only two weeks before.⁴ Based in Los Angeles and New York, the all-white Denishawn Dancers toured the world in the early 1920s, bringing back to the United States a form of modern dance and “exotic ballet” inspired by nonwestern cultures of the “Far East.”⁵ “Barefoot and barelegged,” they managed to dance their way into the imagination of racial purists in Virginia, who, like Copeland himself, perceived such a scene as offensive, believing it would “surely lead to racial amalgamation” and the “destruction of the Anglo Saxon race.”⁶ Rather than endure such a fate, Copeland heeded the warnings of eugenicists Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard in saying that he “preferred every white child in the United States were sterilized and the Anglo Saxon race left to perish in its purity.”⁷

In an effort to placate public concern with “the problem of race mixing,” Hampton’s third white principal, James E. Gregg, assured all white Virginians that they had nothing to fear, as there had been “no essential change” in the “principles or practices of the school.” On the night in question, he insisted, the “institute had simply tried to be courteous and fair” to its “white supporters and Negro constituency,” concluding that he could “not imagine that any thoughtful person could advocate the amalgamation of such widely diverse races.” Unconvinced by Gregg’s assurances, Copeland interpreted such acts of civility as a sign of “social equality” and contrary to the “Virginia spirit, our sense of propriety,” and “time-honored customs.”⁸ If “gone unchecked, ”warned another, “no power on earth would prevent the nigger from entering our homes and marrying our daughters.”⁹

Norfolk’s black newspaper, the Journal and Guide, condemned Copeland’s editorials as a “venomous appeal to race prejudice,” and W. E. B. Du Bois, a longtime critic of Hampton’s “vocational curriculum, dearth of Negro faculty,” and “connections to white philanthropy,” considered such a sentiment an affront to “Negro respectability.”¹⁰ Though sharp and swift, the black response could do little to stem the legislative tide that had, since the turn of the century, increasingly mandated a system of legal segregation in Virginia based on the preservation of “racial integrity.” Beginning with the railroads in 1900, the shadow of Jim Crow quickly fell over the state, enveloping, by 1918, streetcars, residential areas, hospitals, prisons, and cemeteries.¹¹ By 1925, Hampton was looked upon as just another site of interracial contact, which needed to be brought into conformity with existing laws if for no other reason than to “relieve white people of the embarrassment of attending public events at Ogden Hall.” After all, as Mrs. Copeland remarked in a letter to Virginia’s governor, E. Lee Trinkle, “this is a white man’s land and God made the Negro an inferior and disadvantaged race.”¹²

For his part, the governor remained detached from the controversy swirling around Hampton in the summer of 1925, maintaining that his office held “no jurisdiction in thematter.”¹³ The groundswell of support for legislative action, however, came from outside of government where newspapermen and leaders of Virginia’s Anglo-Saxon Club pressed a young local delegate, George Alvin Massenburg, to introduce a bill in the General Assembly that would uphold “racial integrity” by requiring segregated seating at all public gatherings. In February of the following year, the Virginia Senate passed the “Massenburg Bill” against little opposition; the next month it became law.¹⁴ Though originating with Hampton, the new law was strengthened to apply to the entire state, requiring all places of public assemblage and entertainment adhere to a policy of racial separation on penalty of fines up to $500.00.¹⁵

In September of 1927, a young St. Clair Drake left his home in Staunton, Virginia to enroll as a student at Hampton Institute. Once there he encountered a school in revolt against itself and this system of segregation that now mandated black students, many of whom, by this time, had come from outside the South, accept, even on Hampton’s campus, a social order predicated on ideas of black racial inferiority. At issue was the very meaning of higher education for black people and the moral authority of a forwardly thinking white college principal from Massachusetts, who, with the best intentions, walked a fine line between the competing expectations of ardent segregationists and a generation of students that insisted on training that would “advance the race.”¹⁶ Though initially met with stiff resistance, widespread condemnation, and severe reprisals, the organized efforts of students to quicken the pace of change begun by Gregg signified the passing of one era, marked by the hegemony of the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education, and the beginning of another reflecting the higher aspirations of black youth, who, in the aftermath of the “Great War,” demanded all the benefits and privileges promised by modernity.

The Hampton Drake entered was a site of racial contestation uniquely informed by black student resistance to the increasing constraints of segregation. His reflection on this period adds a personal dimension to the existing historiography on black education in the South. More specifically, it shows how efforts to modernize Hampton gave rise to an atmosphere of reform and rebellion, which dramatically transformed a culture of education that originated with its founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong. A student strike and the world it created at Hampton set Drake on a path of social activism characterized, in its earliest years, by his particular commitment to “study, understand, and change the odd world of Jim Crow.”17 After Hampton, he would carry this into a study of the system of racial segregation in the Mississippi Delta during the Great Depression; Chicago’s Bronzeville in the era of black migration; a postwar society of West Indian and African immigrants in Cardiff, Wales; Ghana in an age of African independence; the Caribbean in the period of federation, and back to the United States during and after the Civil Rights movement. His participant observation of black condition(s) in each of these contexts gave rise to a rich body of scholarship challenging established knowledge and foreshadowing new approaches to the study of race and racism in the modern world. That Hampton planted the seed for a life thus lived is an expressive reflection of the models of intellectual activity he encountered there and the courage shown by black youth collectively aligned against a philosophy of education with roots in the postwar South.

Disciplines

African American Studies | Arts and Humanities | Education | Higher Education Administration | History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Social History | United States History

Recommended Citation

Rosa, Andrew. New Negroes on Campus: St. Clair Drake and the Culture of Education, Reform, and Rebellion at Hampton Institute, History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2013.