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I chapter 1 I The Tuskegee Connection Nihil ex nihilo; all things have their beginnings. Humans are time-bound creatures, and in tribute to this reality Hesiod places Clio, the Muse of history, foremost among the nine sisters. When the mind encounters a strange phenomenon or new situation, it summons the historical imagination by looking for antecedents, forerunners, continuities with the past. These early chapters invoke Clio’s assistance in the search for distant origins of Bronzeville’s cultural efflorescence before attention turns to the aesthetic and intellectual currents that dominated the 1930s and 1940s. The present chronological focus, the period marked by the ascendancy of Booker T. Washington within African American life, extends from his Atlanta Exposition speech of 1895 to his death in 1915. These years roughly correspond to the so-called Progressive Era. At the heart of this chapter is the relationship of white Progressives to both Washington and his network of influence. It describes the interracial collaboration that resulted in the founding of the National Urban League and profiles two whites, Robert Park and Julius Rosenwald, who linked Tuskegee Institute, Washington’s power base, with the city of Chicago. Park, Rosenwald, and their circle effected a strategic alliance of social science and philanthropy that had a major impact on African American life and creative expression in Chicago and elsewhere for two generations. The Wizard of Tuskegee The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a savage repression intended to destroy the limited social and political gains of Reconstruction and to restore southern white supremacy to its former sway. The plantation system was revived—no longer based on chattel slavery, but on sharecropping, debt peonage, and convict lease. Disfranchisement followed, and when such legal methods as the poll tax and “grandfather clause” failed, the Ku Klux Klan and lynch mob intervened. In the decades that followed the infamous Compromise of 1877, the legal foundations of the Jim Crow system were laid. As federal troops were withdrawn and Reconstruction governments deposed, state legislatures across the South began enacting laws that mandated racial segregation in all spheres of life, from travel and public accommodations to education and marriage. In the 1890s, these laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in a series of “separate but equal” decisions.1 The racial caste system established after 1877 was largely inimical to black education. Caste by definition is based on fixed positions in the social order while education’s promise of social mobility potentially threatens such feudal arrangements. Education of the 13 I former slaves, moreover, had initially been an interracial endeavor built on staunch abolitionist sentiment. Yankee “schoolmarms” who came South during Reconstruction were the pioneers, along with Union Army officers such as Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Oliver Howard, founders of Hampton Institute and Howard University, respectively. Northern Protestant denominations established church-affiliated schools and colleges, and northern philanthropists provided crucial financial support, especially after the Freedmen ’s Bureau was closed in 1870. From the standpoint of the resurgent white South, however , to educate blacks “beyond their station” was to invite unrest and discontent. “When you educate a negro,” South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman charged, “you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.” Mississippi Governor James Vardaman castigated Yankee philanthropy: “What the North is sending South is not money but dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They’re demanding equality.”2 Blacks were deeply committed to the schooling of their children, however, and mounted stiff resistance to its curtailment. By century’s end, Tuskegee Institute and its founder, Booker T. Washington, had become identified as symbols of their hopes. When Washington arrived in Alabama to start his school in 1881, he was about twenty-five years old. (Slave birthdates were unrecorded so he could not be sure.) He looked exceedingly young despite the handle-bar mustache he had grown for instant gravitas, but his “manly bearing,” earnest manner, and cautious interracial diplomacy won over local officials.3 Born on a plantation near Hale’s Ford, Virginia, he had moved with his family to Malden, West Virginia, after Emancipation, acquiring his sturdy frame working in salt furnaces and coal mines and acquiring his early education in a freedmen’s school taught by a young black man from Ohio. He also came under the patronage of Malden’s wealthiest family: businessman Lewis Ruffner, a former Union Army general, and his wife, Viola, once a teacher in her native Vermont...

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