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In Faithful, Firm, and True: African American Education in the South, Titus Brown traces the dual roles of the northern American Missionary Association (AMA) and the African American community of Macon, GA in their joint effort to provide education to blacks in central Georgia. These education pioneers faced many obstacles including poverty, disease, white hostility, low funds, and a scarcity of qualified teachers. Brown places this history of African-American education in Macon in the context of the national debate over what kind of education best served the black community, and what role blacks should play in the nation’s social, political, and economic life. In doing so, Brown addresses the heated conflict between Booker T Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. What or manner of education the former slaves should receive became a matter of controversy by the end of the nineteenth century. Many white people, especially Southerners thinking of their need for an agricultural labor force, thought that a basic knowledge of “reading, writing, and ‘arithmetic” was sufficient and that former slaves should be taught useful, practical skills in farming and the industrial arts. They believed that so-called “vocational schools” could best serve the interests of both whites and blacks in the South. Booker T. Washington- an important black leader of the post-Civil War period-agreed in general with this approach. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a black vocational school, and cooperated with Northern Philanthropists in securing funds for similar schools throughout the South. Washington pleased the white Southern community by assuring them that African-Americans had no desire for social equality with whites, but simply for economic security. He was initially regarded as a significant race leader by a young, Harvard- educated teacher at Atlanta University, but within a few short years this younger man-W.E.B. DuBois- was in public disagreement with Washington’s educational philosophy. His Souls of Black Folk 1903 was the first medium in which he attacked Washington’s vocational school philosophy as short-sighted and capitulating to white racism. He argued that black people should aspire to a liberal arts education which would enable them to work for their civil rights in the here-and-now, not some theoretical future when whites would be more willing to accommodate them. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute continued to flourish, even after his death in 1915, but DuBois and several like minded whites and African-Americans spearheaded the movement for a vehicle more conductive to black advancement, founding the N.A.A.C.P. in the first decade of the twentieth century. Upon emancipation, many former slaves were anxious to put themselves beyond the control of their former white masters. They moved away from “home” plantations to seek work elsewhere; moved out of the white Christian churches to congregate in all-black institutions, and often felt that their children would be best educated in all-black schools taught by African-American teachers. The sad irony of this latter situation is that when white southerners were again in control of local political institutions at the end of Reconstruction, they enshrined this practice of separate schools in law, but did not fund the black schools to anywhere near the extent of the white schools. Black educational opportunities thus suffered, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the local community. The American Missionary Association (AMA) was the organization for combating such problems. This was a nondenominational society that worked to develop educational opportunities for blacks and other minorities in the United States. The society originally grew out of a committee organized in 1839 to defend a group of African slaves who had mutinied against their Spanish owners and had brought their slave ship (Amistad) into the U.S.
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