Hampton Institute

Civil Rights and Politics at Hampton Institute presents the story of how one of the preeminent--and historically conservative--private institutions of black higher education came to play an important part in the struggle for full racial equality. Hoda Zaki traces Hampton Institute's progressive impact to its first black and alumnus president, Alonzo G. Moron, who used his office to launch a powerful and sustained attack against segregation. A brilliant man, who was uncompromising in his beliefs about creating a more inclusive democracy, Moron struggled against conservative forces both outside of and within his own institution before his ouster by Hampton's predominantly white governing board in 1959--just a year before the Greensboro sit-ins signaled the death knell for the segregationist era in which his institution had prospered. Hoda Zaki details the significance of Moron's complicated career through discussions of his theories of citizenship education, his work in promoting equal rights as a mission for the college, and the political philosophy (as evidenced in his speeches) that he shared with other civil rights leaders of the era.

In Indians at Hampton Institute, Donal F. Lindsey examines the complex and changing interactions among Indians, blacks, and whites at the nation's premier industrial school for racial minorities. He traces the rise and decline of the Indian program in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, analyzing its impact in the U.S. campaign for Indian education.

Compiled by Mentor A. Howe and Roscoe E. Lewis.

Selected from an album of photographs orginally made for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Exhibited in the Edward Steichen Photography Center, Museum of Modern Art, in Jan. 1966.

A historical narrative and critical analysis of higher education centred on the experiences of Black students and faculty at McGill University.

Best remembered as the founder of Hampton Institute and mentor of Booker T. Washington, Samuel Chapman Armstrong played a crucial role in white philanthropy and educational strategies toward nonwhite people in late-nineteenth-century America. Until now, however, there has been no scholarly biography of Armstrong--his story has usually been subsumed within that of his famous protégé. In Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited, Robert Francis Engs illuminates both Armstrong's life and an important chapter in the history of American race relations. Armstrong was the son of missionaries to Hawaii, and as Engs makes clear, his early experiences in a multiracial, predominantly non-European society did much to determine his life's work--the uplift of "backward peoples." After attending Williams College, Armstrong commanded black troops in the Civil War and served as a Freedmen's Bureau agent before founding Hampton in 1869. At the institute, he implemented a unique combination of manual labor education and teacher training, creating an educational system that he believed would enable African Americans and other disfranchised peoples to rise gradually toward the level of white civilization. Recent studies have often blamed Armstrong for "miseducating" an entire generation of African Americans and for Washington's failings as a "race leader." Indeed, as Engs notes, Armstrong's educational designs were paternalistic in the extreme, and in addressing certain audiences, he could sometimes sound like a consummate racist. On the other hand, he frequently expressed a deep devotion to the ultimate equality of African Africans and incorporated the best of his black graduates into the Hampton staff. Sorting through the complexities and contradictions of Armstrong's character and vision, Engs's masterful biography provides new insights into the failures of emancipation and into the sometimes flawed responses of one heir to antebellum abolition and egalitarian Christianity. The Author: Robert Francis Engs is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890.