A HISTORY OF THE BLACK LAND-GRANT COLLEGES 1890-1916

In 1890, the Second Morrill Act, an amendment to the First Morrill Act, became law. The Second Morrill Act was the first federal legislation to require that federal appropriations be divided between the races. As a result of the Act, a system of black land-grant colleges was established in the southern and border states of the United States. Using the Congressional Record, the annual reports of the Bureau of Education, institutional histories, and other relevant sources, this study chronicles the development of the colleges between 1890 and 1916. The thesis of the study is that social, political, economic, and educational factors motivated by the racial attitudes of the white South hindered the development of the black land-grant institutions and prevented their becoming true institutions of higher education during the period of the study. The study investigates a number of questions related to the early history of the black land-grant institutions: (1) What higher educational opportunities were available to black people before 1890? (2) What effect did the Pugh Amendment have on the historical development of the institutions? (3) How were the institutions administered and controlled? (4) How were the institutions supported? (5) What were the major curricular determinants? (6) Who were the administrators and faculty? (7) What problems did the faculty have? (8) What was student life like? Sources for answering these questions were both primary and secondary. Opportunities in higher education for black people were restricted before the passage of the Second Morrill Act, but some black students did attend college in America. Beginning before the American Revolution, black higher education began as an effort to train ministers for service in Africa. Some black institutions were established before the Civil War. The growth in black higher education began after the Civil War as the Freedman's Bureau and religious denominations--black and white--sought to eliminate illiteracy in a black population of four million. The black land-grant institutions were established not because the South wanted black people to have higher education but because it needed the supplementary endowment the Second Morrill Act provided. The Senate debate clearly reveals the attitude and intentions of the South. For twenty-six years, the southern states allowed the institutions to languish, appropriating only enough support to receive the funds from the Second Morrill Act and maintain teacher-training, agricultural, and industrial curricula. The racial ideology of Samuel Chapman Armstrong became the chief determinant of the curricula of the colleges and a guiding beacon for the control of student life in the black land-grant institutions. Accepted by the South, Armstrong's racial ideology as represented by the Hampton Idea saw black education as a means of behavior modification, moral development, acceptance of social and political subordination, and economic placement of black people in the South. Ignored by state legislatures and forgotten or abandoned by the federal government, the black land-grant colleges struggled through the period of the study, laying the foundation for their development as a part of American higher education. In the conclusion of the study, the black land-grant institutions are depicted as they were described in the Bureau of Education's massive study of black education, Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States.