Good Morning and TGIF POU!
Today we look at the history of higher education for African Americans in the coal lands of Appalachia.
Berea College Graduating Class of 1901
Berea College is a liberal arts college in southern Kentucky. Today, students come from 46 states and 58 countries to attend the school, but it was founded in 1855 to service the residents of the Appalachia region.
Berea College is distinctive among post-secondary institutions for providing free education to students and for having been the first college in the Southern United States to be coed and racially integrated. Even today, there is no tuition, however, students are required to work at least 10 hours per week in campus and service jobs in over 130 departments.
Founded in 1855 by the abolitionist John Gregg Fee (1816–1901), Berea College admitted both black and white students in a fully integrated curriculum, making it the first non-segregated college in the South.
Berea College students 1899
The college began as a one-room schoolhouse that also served as a church on Sundays on land that was granted to Fee by politician and abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay. Fee named the new community after the biblical Berea. Although the school’s first articles of incorporation were adopted in 1859, founder John Gregg Fee and the teachers were forced out of the area by pro-slavery supporters in that same year.
In 1866, Berea’s first full year after the Civil war, it had 187 students, of whom 96 were black and 91 white. It began with preparatory classes to ready students for advanced study at the college level. In 1869, the first college students were admitted, and the first bachelor’s degrees were awarded in 1873.
In 1904, the Kentucky state legislature’s passage of the “Day Law” disrupted Berea’s interracial education by prohibiting education of black and white students together. The college challenged the law in state court and further appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in Berea College v. Kentucky. When the challenge failed, the college had to become a segregated school, but it set aside funds to help establish the Lincoln Institute near Louisville to educate black students. In 1925 famed advertiser Bruce Barton, a future congressman, sent a letter to 24 wealthy men in America to raise funds for the college. Every single letter was returned with a minimum of $1,000 in donation. In 1950, when the law was amended to allow integration of schools at the college level, Berea promptly resumed its integrated policies.
Appalachian native Carter G. Woodson, 1903 graduate of Berea College
Storer College was an HBCU located in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. It operated from 1865 until 1955.
This school was part of a larger national effort by northern philanthropic organizations and the government’s Freedmen’s Bureau to educate the thousands of African Americans freed by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. From Harpers Ferry, Reverend Nathan Cook Brackett of the Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society, directed the efforts of dedicated missionary teachers, who provided a basic education to thousands of former slaves congregated in the relatively safe haven of the Shenandoah Valley by the end of the Civil War.
Dedicated as they were, these few teachers could not begin to meet the educational needs of the freedmen in the area. By 1867, there were still only 16 teachers to educate 2,500 students. Reverend Brackett realized the only way to reach all these students was to train African American teachers.
In 1867, Reverend Brackett’s school came to the attention of John Storer, a philanthropist from Maine. Storer offered a $10,000 grant to if several conditions could be met. First, the school must eventually become a degree-granting college. Second, the school had to be open to all applicants, regardless of race or gender. And, finally, the most difficult prerequisite: The Freewill Baptist Church had to match the $10,000 donation within the year. After a year-long effort, the money was raised, and Storer Normal School opened its doors, and by March 1868 it received its state charter.
Raising $10,000 turned out to be easy compared to facing local resistance to a “colored school.” Residents of Harpers Ferry tried everything from slander and vandalism to pulling political strings in their efforts to shut down the school. One teacher wrote, “it is unusual for me to go to the Post Office without being hooted at, and twice I have been stoned on the streets at noonday.”
These efforts did not succeed in closing Storer Normal School, and eventually, local attitudes changed. Later in his life, Reverend Brackett became a respected citizen of Harpers Ferry.
Understanding that former slaves needed to learn more than the three Rs to function in society, Storer founders looked to provide more than a basic education. According to the first college catalog, students were to “receive counsel and sympathy, learn what constitutes correct living, and become qualified for the performance of the great work of life.” In its early years, Storer taught freedmen to read, write, spell, do sums, and to go back into their communities to teach others these lessons.
As the years went by, Storer remained primarily a Teachers College, but added courses in higher education as well as in industrial training. Students graduated with a normal degree for teaching or an academic degree for those going on to college.
In 1881, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech on abolitionist John Brown at Storer.
In August 1906, Storer Normal School hosted the second conference of the Niagara Movement. Formed by a group of leading African American intellectuals, the Niagara Movement struggled to eliminate discrimination based on color. The movement’s leader, Doctor W. E. B. Du Bois, rejected the prevalent theory of “accommodation” espoused by Booker T. Washington, who advocated conciliation rather than agitation as a means of gaining social equality.
In 1938, under the leadership of school president Henry T. McDonald, Storer became a college. Enrollment peaked at around 400, and dipped lower during World War II.
Although the school granted four-year degrees, it was never accredited, and the college was forced to turn away some students. Those who wanted to be doctors, for example, were not admitted, because the college lacked the money to provide the necessary facilities to properly prepare students for these advanced studies.
In 1954, the Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case ended legal segregation in public schools in the United States. Immediately after the ruling, West Virginia withdrew its financial support from Storer College. Financial burdens had been accumulating for a decade, and in June 1955, Storer College closed its doors forever. (West Virginia continues to support two other historically black state universities: Bluefield State College and West Virginia State University.)
The “White” HBCUs – Bluefield State College and West Virginia State University
Bluefield State College (BSC) is a historically black college located in Bluefield, West Virginia. The college is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.
By 1930 a larger percentage of West Virginia black youth attended high school than in any other southern or border state. Similarly, in 1933-1934 ninety-four of every thousand blacks between ages eighteen and twenty-one were enrolled in public colleges, whereas the ratio for whites was only fifty-three per thousand. The children of miners were highly represented in West Virginia’s black college population. For example, over 50 percent of the 1932-33 freshman class at West Virginia State were the sons and daughters of coal miners or other unskilled workers. At Bluefield State, 93.9 percent of the 232 students were the children of coal miners.
Even though it maintains its federal status as a historically black college, today, Bluefield State College is 90% white.
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