Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954: An Intellectual History

8. Teaching: “That Which Relieves Their Hunger”

8 Teaching “That Which Relieves Their Hunger” The hungry cannot listen well to any teaching but that which relieves their hunger. Mary McLeod Bethune, on visiting Liberia, 1952 In 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) was housed in the War Department , just as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was in the 1820s. Educating black people was not initially a priority of the Freedmen’s Bureau; it was organized for the managing of property and the maintenance of social order during a time of national upheaval. When the education of freedmen did become an issue for the postbellum federal government, the systems were built on preexisting systems or were mainly sustained by black people’s efforts to educate themselves. Most white missionaries who taught assumed black biological inferiority. Those few who did advocate African American education presupposed a moral, intellectual, or cultural absence within black families and communities. Government and philanthropic education often attempted to get the “Negroes” to accept their lower status in society while educating them enough to be materially useful. But not all teachers instructed from such a narrow primer.1 Between the Civil War and World War I, teacher education provided the major thrust for a higher education population explosion: the people were hungry for knowledge, and a teaching force needed to be trained. Most American colleges and universities of this era became teacher-training institutions , generally “producing more teachers than anything else.” African American colleges were no exception to this trend. Black women were seldom offered administrative or prime teaching positions, routinely taught more students for less pay, and struggled to overcome external and internal badges of inferiority. But they moved with the rest of the country in a surge of educational development. Black women dedicated their lives to teaching; Cooper and Bethune detailed their pedagogies, leaving a guide to teaching Teaching: “That Which Relieves Their Hunger” 161 relevant to institutions interested in developing socially engaged and civicminded campuses.2 Cooper—Teaching beyond Books Cooper argued that schools in general and teachers in particular were parts of communities and were therefore responsible to parents and families. In her estimation, before pointing to parental shortcoming as an explanation of students’ maladaptive school behavior, school administrators and teachers needed to consider the larger social climate that impacted parental choices and options. Instead of blaming parents, teachers needed to hold themselves accountable for assisting students in any way possible and for gathering relevant information that might assist in fairly assessing and appropriately facilitating the students’ development. Though the efficacy of teachers largely depended on institutional support, legal constraints, and physical resources, Cooper’s insight was instructive because she saw herself as a community servant who was not bound by school grounds or college campus. Historians have documented the increase in the number of lynchings between Emancipation and World War I and the great toll they took on black families, particularly in the South. When Cooper volunteered to teach in West Virginia at the war’s end, she encountered a black family devastated by the murder of the father. While tutoring the children of the Berry family, she noticed that they were quiet and withdrawn. In “Sketches from a Teacher’s Notebook: Loss of Speech through Isolation” (1923?), Cooper described what took place when she visited the family. The mother was at first reluctant to talk to Cooper.3 It was not until I had left W—that I understood the tragedy of Mrs. Berry’s grim struggle with life. Her husband, an innocent man, had been torn from her arms by an infuriated mob and brutally murderedlynched . The town realized its mistakes afterwards when the true culprit confessed but it was too late to bind up that broken family, and the humble drama of that obscure black woman like a wounded animal with her cubs literally digging herself in and then at bay dumbly turning to face—America—her “head bloody but unbowed.” I swear the pathos and inexorable fatefulness of that titanic struggle—an inescapable one in the clash of American forces, is worthy of an Epic for its heroic grandeur and unconquerable grit. And I wondered what our brand of education, what our smug injunction that the home “is expected” to 162 Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954 cooperate with the school will find or create for the help and guidance of such...