Assimilationist HBCU founders assumed Black degeneracy and white cultural superiority

Evidence

These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs “to educate … a number of blacks,” and then “send them forth to regenerate” their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England’s Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed “white teachers” to be “the best,” as claimed in the New York National Freedman’s Relief Association in its 1865–1866 annual report. HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the “high culture” of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of “refined,” often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily “unrefined” poor Blacks. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 650

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete embodiment of the assimilationist position: education as regeneration from degeneracy, acceptance of white norm.
• XREF: The biracial graduates dismissed as products of White blood directly mirrors earlier mulatto-class theorizing in the book.