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8. The AMA Colleges
- The University of Alabama Press
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The AMA Colleges [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:58 GMT) ATLANTA UNIVERSITY? Atlanta University?" Ralph Waldo .; I ~ Emerson responded querulously when Thomas N. Chase => handed him an Atlanta catalog. "There is no institution in this country that comes anywhere near being a university except Harvard and that does not really deserve the title."! If Emerson's view is accepted , black institutions of higher education did not exist during Reconstruction . Nevertheless, a system of colleges and universities was established soon after the Civil War that became the black American's major assurance of advanced training. A pioneer in black higher education in the South was the American Missionary Association, which between 1866 and 1869 chartered seven "colleges" and assisted in founding Howard University.2 The AMA concept of "equality" led it from the beginning to assume that its task would be incomplete until blacks had access to all levels of education. Although the AMA advocated equality, most of its officers believed that blacks were "an absolutely undeveloped race with a long heredity of ignorance, superstition and degradation" that would require generations to erase. Their "civilizing mission" demanded permanent institutions where exceptional black youth could be educated to uplift their brethren. The AMA officers believed that education was a state and local responsibility. Their elementary work was to be pursued only until it could be turned over to the states. The association believed the same about secondary education, but public black high schools developed so slowly that the AMA was required to continue them longer. Black colleges, on the other hand, were to be permanent .3 The establishment of colleges for blacks was, of course, a long-range plan. Association officers did not naively think that adequate colleges could be immediately founded. Capital, students with sufficient train123 124 CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION ing, able and sacrificing faculty, and especially hard work would be required. But they dreamed ofa time when black youth would have the same opportunity for higher education as whites. The association denied that it ever chartered a college solely for blacks; students of all races were welcome. Such colleges were necessary because white colleges were not readily available to freedmen. The association officers realized that few whites would attend AMA schools, but as Edward P. Smith said when proposing a college in Atlanta, "I would, by all means open the school to all without distinction ofcolor. Practically, the whites will exclude themselves for a while-not long-for I am confident we can make it such a school as will attract them over the high wall of prejudice, and, in the course of years, will grow to the character and power of a school like Oberlin." Smith was too optimistic. The only whites in most early AMA colleges (except Berea and Straight) were faculty children.4 A description of Fisk, Talladega, and Straight (now Dillard) will illustrate problems encountered and the range of quality of the seven colleges the AMA had chartered by 1869.5 Among the scores who went South to teach freedmen were John Ogden, Erastus M. Cravath, and Smith, all ofwhom became the prime movers in founding Fisk University , one of the outstanding black schools in the United States. Ogden, a former Union officer who had been a Confederate prisoner, was Bureau superintendent of education in Tennessee. Cravath, an underground railroad worker, Oberlin graduate, and Union Army chaplain, was field secretary for the AMA. Smith was district secretary of the association's Middle West Department at Cincinnati. In the fall of 1865 the AMA directed Smith and Cravath to establish a freedmen's school in Nashville. With Ogden's assistance they secured an abandoned Union hospital complex and opened Fisk on 9January 1866 with Ogden as principal. The aims of Fisk School were commendable and loftysome thought impractical. The founders proposed a free graded school based upon a "broad Christian foundation." Initially the school was designed to supply desperately needed black teachers, but the founders had more grandiose plans: they intended that Fisk become a firstclass college.6 When Fisk opened, students came by the hundreds. Almost two hundred enrolled immediately and by the year's end there was an average daily attendance of one thousand ranging in age from seven to The AMA Colleges 125 seventy. Naturally, most of the students were in primary work, learning the alphabet or struggling to master the words in the First Reader. But the dream of a normal school and college was not lost. Ogden argued...