Black communities resisted Spelman graduates’ imposition of middle-class Victorian norms

Evidence

It was not uncommon for the Spelman women to meet with resistance, however. Some blacks rejected their Victorian ideals and viewed their “assimilationist” goals as divisive in families and communities. Student teacher Gertrude Murray spoke of her difficulty in banning the use of snuff and tobacco. Emma De Lamotta visited a black community in the quarries of Georgia where the residents had never had a Sabbath school and were opposed to education. “They say we have a factory at Spelman,” De Lamotta wrote to Packard, “where we make girls work.” After talking to a crowd for about an hour on the subject of temperance, a missionary in South Carolina attested to the difficulty of converting her listeners. “None of them considered themselves drunkards,” she bemoaned, “for they never drank enough to lay them in the gutter, or at least not very often and a moderate drinker is, in their minds, a long way from a drunkard.” During vacation from school, students often met resistance from their own family members when they returned home and endeavored to alter long-established patterns. A missionary reported that the students were called “bigheaded” or “too fine” because of their tireless efforts to sway parents from smoking and drinking. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 199

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘politics of respectability’ coinage the reader is seeking - these are the grassroots resistors whose values get policed by the educated elite imposing Victorian respectability norms, relevant background for how such policing generated internal tension and resistance.
• XREF: connects to: Black communities and families resisted Spelman’s Victorian reform ideals as divisive — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 199; Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 224; Black lower-class customs amounted to a political rejection of English bourgeois morality (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Black communities and families resisted Spelman’s Victorian reform ideals as divisive #corroborates (0.96) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 199
• Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society #expands (0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 224
• Black lower-class customs amounted to a political rejection of English bourgeois morality #expands (0.76)
• Black lower-class culture functioned as political resistance through moral rejection of bourgeois colonial norms. #expands (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1177
• Black Baptists policed cultural difference from white middle-class norms as retrogressive #expands (0.73) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 918