Educating elite black women was deemed essential to spreading correct values

Evidence

The Female Talented Tenth became essential to the northern Baptists’ program. Indeed, it was the conscious motive of self-preservation that led them to describe their earlier all-male policy of education as “short sighted and suicidal.” In 1891 Malcolm MacVicar, superintendent of the board of education for the ABHMS, emphasized the role of the Female Talented Tenth over that of ministerial students. Arguing that women played the more direct and pervasive role in spreading “correct” values throughout black communities, he consequently urged the establishment of missionary departments in at least four of the largest black colleges. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the Talented Tenth concept and the gendered construction of moral uplift that Higginbotham argues Black Baptist women later seized and repurposed in the politics of respectability. — connects to: Black and white missionaries jointly imposed Victorian domesticity as core black education. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 458; Racism’s lumping of all black women together justified elite uplift toward the lowly — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 943; Black leaders justified women’s education by framing mothers as bearers of social caste. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 131 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race #expands (0.79)
• Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women #complicates (0.76) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 727
• Black elites pursued the same education for racial empowerment whites sought for social control #complicates (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 236
• Educated black elites were trained as a mediating restraint against mass violence #qualifies (0.74) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 154