Nathan B. Young and the Struggle Over Black Higher Education (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 152 agents and community blacks (p. 242). Hoffschwelle affirms the importance of black churches and ministers in rallying support for schools but does not detail that role as fully as she might have. Overall,Hoffschwelledoesjusticetothissignificantchapterofthesouthern experience. For African Americans across the South, a Rosenwald school in their community symbolized “the visible result of [their] initiative and persistence” (p. 264). Many of the buildings made possible by their sacrifice remain part of the southern landscape. Scholars and laypersons interested in educational history, African American history, Progressive reform and philanthropy, architecture, and material culture will be especially interested in this excellent volume. ANDREW J. WOOD Auburn University Nathan B. Young and the Struggle Over Black Higher Education. By Antonio F. Holland. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. x, 236 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8262-1690-3. Nathan B. Young was both a remarkable individual and, as Antonio Holland’s title suggests, historically representative. Young’s entire adult life was devoted to a struggle against assumptions a century ago that the proper education for African American students was strictly vocational. An Alabamian, Young was born a slave in Newbern in 1862. He never knew his father—Young was the surname of the ex-slave whom his mother married shortly after the Civil War and emancipation. That mother, Susan Young, was determined that her son would be successful, and pushed him to get a secondary education at Talladega College and then a college degree from Oberlin in 1888. Though he held several other posts for short periods, Young’s long career as an educator consisted chiefly of three positions: as teacher and something akin to academic dean at Tuskegee Institute (1892–97), as president at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College (1901–23), and as president at Lincoln University of Missouri (1923–27 and 1929– 31). Young parted ways with the authorities who controlled each of these schools, partly because he sought to make classic academic education available to black students and partly because he was, evidently, temperamentally unbending. At Tuskegee, Booker Washington made Young “head teacher” of the Academic Department, responsible for personnel decisions and arrang- A P R I L 2 0 0 7 153 ing class offerings. Young consistently requested more resources for his department than Washington wanted to supply; the principal focused his attention and resources on the Mechanic and Trades Department. Holland finds that Washington became more dictatorial—he had always had that tendency—after the fame of his Atlanta Exposition speech of 1895. Two years later Young resigned. After four years at a college in Georgia, Young accepted the presidency of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he enjoyed a remarkably successful tenure of more than twenty years. Despite the college’s name, for two decades (1901–21) Young managed to wage a successful sort of guerilla warfare, using both federal and state funds which whites appropriated for vocational training to build a college with a strong traditional academic curriculum. Such high-minded subterfuge was possible only because the white, state-appointed Board of Control essentially chose to look the other way and allow Young to build a genuine college. All this changed with the 1920 election of a governor determined to return Florida A&M to vocational training. A new Board of Control sacked Young in 1923. He immediately assumed the presidency of Lincoln University in Missouri—a state, unlike Florida, in which the black community had a significant voice. Unfortunately, Lincoln was politicized even more than Florida A&M. Over the decades since its founding in 1867, some faculty and staff positions had regularly been filled by political patronage. Here Young had to battle not only those forces in the white community which wanted to limit the education of blacks, but a whirlpool of partisan political forces, white and black. In 1925 the inauguration of a governor unsympathetic to Young’s high academic goals presaged the inevitable: he was fired in 1927 after only four years at the helm. But, in keeping with the rapid changes in Missouri’s political weather, a sympathetic new governor in 1929 returned Young...