Transcription
There's nothing wrong with having status, but what is it to a people to have all the status in the world but have no standards to stand upon? Well, this was the case for a new group of middle-class blacks, as explained by author and sociologist Dr. E. Franklin Frazier in his book, right here, called *Black Bourgeoisie*, which was published in 1957. And so, this area of critique on this particular group of blacks, it took place in the field of education and in teaching. So, what I want you to do is follow along right now so we can see how these blacks traded in standards for status. So, here we go.
So, starting on page 71, it says this: The missionaries from New England who founded the first schools for Negroes in the South left the imprint of their Puritan background upon Negro education. So, these missionaries were a Christian Protestant group who helped establish Negro education in the South after the Emancipation. Although by 1830, Puritanism in New England had begun to decline, it was still a dominant force in the lives of people. For example, in 1830, employers in New England were able to oppose the reduction of the number of hours of labor to 10 hours on the ground that too much leisure time would encourage vice among workers. As a result of the influx of European immigrants and the Civil War, New England, and in fact the United States as a whole, began to discard its prior and puritanical morals. But the missionaries who came from New England represented the native English stock and were imbued with the Puritan tradition. So, New England as a whole was already starting to creep away from these old traditional values, but this particular stock who went to the South, they were still immersed in that same traditional type of culture.
As a consequence, they maintained a strict surveillance over the conduct of their Negro students in order to stamp out any tendency towards frivolous or immoral conduct. Because of the system of social control in these missionary schools, it was not difficult to maintain an atmosphere of piety. All the students were required to attend chapel once or twice a day. At the chapel exercises, they heard the reading of the Bible, which was followed by a prayer. Generally, some lesson was drawn from the scripture in order to show its application to their lives. Visiting speakers who appeared at the chapel exercises were selected with a view to seeing that their talk would fit into the spirit of the school. As a result, representatives of the Young Men's Christian Association or Young Women's Christian Association and similar organizations proved to be the most eligible speakers for such occasions. The pious teachings at chapel exercises were reinforced in weekly prayer meetings. The whole emphasis of these various meetings was to give the students a sentimental and moral, as opposed to a rational and scientific, outlook on life. Moral behavior meant that the students were not to dance, smoke, or play cards. In some schools, a concession was made to the desire on the part of the students to dance by permitting them to march on social occasions, but a strict surveillance was maintained in order to prevent any steps that would be surreptitious dancing. Surreptitious meaning doing it in secret. They didn't want them to secretly dance, so they kept a close eye on them.
In such an environment of piety, it was natural that chapel services on Sunday were especially important, and that the students should spend the day as quietly as possible, even refraining from light or frivolous conversation. Many industrial schools maintained an atmosphere as pious as the colleges, and when the Negroes themselves began to assume control of their schools, they tried to maintain the same tradition of piety. At Tuskegee Institute, which was always under the control of Negroes, education of the black bourgeoisie, the tradition of piety was almost as strong as Hampton Institute, which was under white control. So, it looks like they had a system in place to direct the character of the Negro in a particular direction, right? And they were using the Bible and using some of the stories in there to help do this, right? And so they were trying to eliminate some of the habits that the Negro had picked up and passed along that came from the slave culture.
So, let's continue going. At the chapel exercises, moral conduct, which included refraining from playing cards, was stressed by Washington, who said, and this right here is talking about Booker T. Washington, who said, "Do not play cards." Now, what's wrong with playing cards, you might ask? Let's see how they viewed it. Playing cards, you will insist, is no more harmful than playing dominoes or croquet, but it is a fact undeniable that playing cards leads to something more harmful than either of the games I have just mentioned. And just to add, the Negroes picked up the card playing and dominoes from the Southern rednecks. The ancestors that came from West Africa, they didn't bring dominoes over to the Americas with them. The Southerners brought that over with them coming from Europe, right, where they were said to have played those games over extended periods of time, along with getting drunk and rolling the dice, right? You can read this in Dr. Grady McWhiney's account in the book called *The Cracker Culture* on page 132, right?
And so, let's continue going. Card playing has a history, and it is the experience of men who understand crime, who understand civilization in all its grades, that card playing has been the source of any number of crimes. It leads to late hours, bad company, abetting proclivity, and finally, it leads to the using of other people's money. So, card playing was linked to criminal activity in the minds of the people at that time, and also being caught up in debt, which is why they wanted the Negroes to relinquish their interest in that type of activity. Let's keep going.
In the pious atmosphere of this missionary school, the students were found to be listless and without any desire to learn, which makes sense because they came from a culture or they inherited a mindset that did not value education, right? Let's continue. There was some resentment among the students against the system of control, but on the whole, they submitted silently for fear of losing an opportunity to secure an education. They seemed to suffer from an unjustified fear that if they did not exhibit a spirit of cheerful gratitude towards the white Northerners, they would be expelled from the school. The only concession that was made to the Negro's culture was that the students were required to sing spirituals for the white visitors. But though the school was saturated with religious feeling, the required religious activities were designed to wean them from the religious emotionalism of the Negro.
Now, what's the religious emotionalism of the Negro? It's the hooting and hollering that many of the black churches still do today. That intense emotionalism to religion that was developed by the blacks during slavery as a means to cope with their environment and to cope with the circumstances that they found themselves in. So, these schools were designed to get them to relax a little bit, right? To chill out and not be so emotional when they talk about God or when they pick up a Bible or something, right? Let's continue.
The graduates of this college would teach, as this European rightly observes, what little they knew to real Negroes whom they did not know. In the pious environment of the colleges, the students were taught to be industrious and thrifty, wasting neither time nor money. So, so they were taught to work hard, save money, and not to sit around and become idle, right? And to do idle things. The regimen and discipline of these colleges were designed to teach these ideals. Moreover, because of the close association of teachers and students, the students learned by the example set by their teachers, as well as by precept. Also, the literary training given by these schools was represented in the habits, enjoyments, and ideals of teachers. In the industrial schools, the ideal of thrift was tied up with labor. Booker T. Washington has regarded the teaching of the dignity of labor to be one of the primary tasks of industrial education. There was one point on which the proponents of industrial education and higher education were agreed: the Negro student should strive to be respectable. And isn't becoming a respectable person something that every human should strive for? I think so.
Here we go. As we have seen, Du Bois has said that the best of the race should guide the mass away from the worst. And that's referring to Du Bois's idea of The Talented Tenth, where he believed that the top 10% of the Negroes should be developed as much as possible, and then from there, they should be a beacon of light to the masses of the Negroes, right? To help them lift themselves up. Let's continue.
And Booker T. Washington, who always counseled his students against the shiftlessness and rude behavior of Negroes, told them in one Sunday evening talk, "There is a beauty, a transformation, as it were, a regeneration that takes place in the physical makeup of a young man or young woman who gets into the habit of living on the high side of life rather than on the low side." And the low side is talking about the pits, which is filled with struggle, crime, misfortune, and a miserable life. And the high side would be the opposite of that, right? Let's continue.
Negro students were supposed to be differentiated in their morals, as well as in their manners, from the Negro masses, which tells you that the Negro masses, or the great majority of the Negroes at that time, were known to have substandard morals, and they wanted their students to be different from them, right? In other words, they had different expectations for these students. Let's continue. For that reason, they were not to indulge in the religious emotionalism of the black masses.
In some cases, the core of the student bodies of the schools founded by the missionaries consisted of the children of Negroes, predominantly mulatto, who were free before the Civil War. It was not difficult to get the children of this favored group, which was differentiated from the ex-slaves by education and general culture, to conform to the standards of respectability. You see that? These were students who did not inherit the slave culture, the slave mentality, and the slave mannerisms, which made a world of a difference because that means that they did not have to try as hard to conform to the school standards and expectations, which was probably because they most likely had already been raised with many of those standards.
Here we go. But where the school drew its student bodies more largely from the masses of freedmen, this is talking about the descendants of the newly freed slaves, a strict discipline was necessary in order to inculcate and maintain standards of respectability. That's the countercurrent of energy that's working against them because they inherited a culture that was completely opposite of what the school was trying to teach them and the values that the school had for them. And so the staff had to work much harder, and they had to use much more energy to get them up to that standard.
First, students were taught to speak English correctly, and thus avoid the ungrammatical speech and dialect of the Negro masses. They were expected to be courteous, speak softly, and never exhibit the spontaneous boisterousness of the ordinary Negroes. In other words, they were expected to become a new person, which everyone has the ability to do because all humans possess the same characteristics. It's just that certain groups, they express certain characteristics more than the other group does, right? But anyone could learn to be any characteristic. They can learn to be courteous, excuse me, thank you, I appreciate that, I appreciate your help, right? And anyone could learn to be rude, shut up, you're stupid, you're dumb. Each characteristic is in every human to some degree, and like I said, some express them more than others. Let's continue.
When they walk down the street, people should be able to say, "There goes an exceptional girl or boy." So, they wanted to create a clear distinction between the Negroes that went to these types of schools and the Negro masses, the other ones out there. And this was done by developing the character, changing the behavior, and also changing the mannerisms. To be detected in immoral sexual behavior, especially if the guilty person was a woman, meant expulsion from the school, right? They're not trying to get this behavior pattern to infiltrate and infect the environment that they have set up. So, if you got caught doing it, you're out of here. Let's continue.
It was only the common Negroes who engaged in premarital and unconventional sex relations. That behavior was supposed to be only something that a typical Negro was supposed to be involved in, not something that a person who went to these schools was involved in, right? Different expectation, different culture that they're trying to develop. Let's continue. The graduates of those schools were to go forth and become the heads of conventional families, right? So, these were some of the expectations that the Northern missionaries and other cultured Negroes had for these selected groups of Negroes that they were training in these colleges.
Now, what I want you to watch is what happened next when the times changed, right? This is very important, a very important piece of Black American history for you to be familiar with. So, here we go. It says this: The mass migration of Negroes from the South during and following the First World War affected the education of the Negro as it did other phases of his life because, as some of us know, the vast majority of the Negroes, they still lived in the South in the early 1900s. In the book, he talks about 90% still lived in the South, and most of these Negroes, they were the agents or the carriers of the slave culture. And as the opportunities became more available for them to go into other parts of the country, they began to migrate, right? And obviously, they took that mentality along with them.
And so, it says this: When hundreds of thousands of Negroes who had migrated to Northern cities gained access to the same education as whites, the controversy concerning the relative merits of industrial education and higher education lost its significance. And so, from here, let's jump over a couple of pages to get more insight into what happened. In 1926, the first Negro was elected president of Howard University. The Atlanta University system was set up under a Negro president. Negro students, as well as teachers, were demanding that their schools be placed under Negro administrators. The election of Negro administrators in Negro colleges represented, to a certain extent, a revolt against missionary education. But the transformation which was occurring indicated something more fundamental than a change from white to Negro administration. The entire orientation and aim of higher education of Negroes was changing. It was natural that, as a result of the revolt against missionary education, these institutions would lose much of their piety.
So, here we go. Dancing, card playing, and smoking ceased to be deadly sins, and requirements concerning chapel attendance were modified, right? Only in the smaller and isolated schools did the tradition of piety linger. Now, why did it linger there? Because they were isolated and didn't have much of an influence from these other folks coming in. There was less talk about thrift and the dignity of labor. Respectability became less a question of morals and manners and more a matter of the external marks of a high standard of living. You see that? The culture shifted from the inner work and the development of morals and standards to that of a focus more on the outer appearance and the outer importances, and especially material possessions.
Watch this. As the children of the Negro masses have flooded the colleges, it was inevitable that the traditional standards of morals and manners would have to give way. Now, remember, the Negro masses were the carriers of the slave culture, and since it was way more of them, they carried a way larger mass of energy with them that shifted the culture, right? If it was like 10 or 20 of them, then their influence would most likely not have been so great, but it was hundreds of thousands of them, as Dr. Franklin states, right?
Now, let's see what they brought with them. These children of the peasants had no particular interest in learning to speak correctly, nor in cultivating the gentility of their predecessors who had come under the strict discipline of Northern missionaries. The blacks with the slave culture, they had no desire to learn English properly, nor to change their values. And what's worse than trying to get people to do something that they don't truly want to do? Let's continue.
Many of them, having come from a background of disorganized family life, were strangers to the traditional puritanical morality of these schools. A chance for a college education represented for them the chief means of achieving social and economic mobility. The colleges had to make concessions to their poor educational and social backgrounds. But the children of the Negro masses were not primarily responsible for the change in the character of the Negro college. The outlook and aims of the colleges changed in response to the aspirations and values of the second generation of Negro college students and their Negro teachers, who were imbued with the middle-class values. So, the second generation of the Negro masses and their teachers are who played the biggest part in the change of the college culture, right? They had the middle-class values, which we talked about. It consisted of more material things. And on top of that, they still had the slave values, which they had inherited. And when you put those two together and blended it, this was the result that came.
Unlike the missionary teachers, the present teachers have little interest in making men, but are concerned primarily with teaching as a source of income, which will enable them to maintain middle-class standards and participate in Negro society. See, they were all about money, materialism, and status. According to Dr. Frazier, they didn't care about making men for the future; they cared about themselves and keeping a certain status. Let's continue.
It appears that the majority of them have no knowledge of books, nor any real love of literature. And why is that? Because the slaves were cut off from knowledge. It was illegal for them to read, so they developed a slave culture which did not include a high value placed on books, and they passed on that culture to their generations. Let's continue.
Today, many of the teachers of English and literature never read a book as a source of pleasure or recreation. Now, remember, he said that they were doing this job just to get paid and also to maintain a certain status, so they were just going through the motions, and they didn't really have a passion for education and for learning. Let's continue.
They go through a dull routine of teaching literature or other college subjects to listless students, many of whom cannot read. The second and third generation of Negro college students are as listless as the children of peasants. Again, listless meaning unenthusiastic and unmotivated. And he says the second and the third generation were just as listless as the children of the peasants. Let's continue.
The former, meaning the second generation, are interested primarily in the activities of Greek letter societies and social life, while the latter, meaning the third generation, are concerned with gaining social acceptance by the former. Both are less concerned with the history or the understanding of the world about them than with their appearance at the next social affair. The girl with a peasant or working-class background may be irritated by her mother's inability to buy an expensive party dress, but what can be expected when the dean of women has instructed her to tell her mother that she must have the dress at any sacrifice? So, teachers and students alike are agreed that money and conspicuous consumption are more important than knowledge or the enjoyment of books and art and music. There's an example of the pressure to conform. They had created an environment where the herd mentality says that people should place more value on buying material things rather than understanding the world around them and on books. And since most people naturally don't like to stand out, it makes them simply conform. Let's continue.
Thus, it has turned out that Negro higher education has become devoted chiefly to the task of educating the black bourgeoisie. The United Negro College Fund, which was started in 1944, provides the small sum of about $2 million for 32 Negro colleges. This is a gesture on the part of White America expressing its approval of middle-class education for Negroes. Behind the walls of segregation, sometimes the appeal to White America is made on the sentimental grounds that the schools receiving financial support are educating the children of slaves who are thirsty for knowledge, which will enable them to become men, which we see wasn't true according to the account of Dr. Frazier. They weren't thirsty for knowledge; what they were thirsty for was for money and for status.
Watch this. But the present generation of Negro college students, who are not the children but the great-grandchildren of slaves, do not wish to recall their past. As they ride to school in their automobiles, they prefer to think of the money which they will earn as professionals and businessmen, for they have been taught that money will bring them justice and equality in American life, and they propose to get money. There we go.
So, I want to thank you for watching all the way into the end. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I'll see you in the Free World.