Hampton Institute’s vocational training was designed to teach Black acceptance of white supremacy

Evidence

Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans “had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism,” the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedmen’s Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks’ working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 651

Categorization

• XREF: Armstrong’s vocational model presages Booker T. Washington; the ‘dignity of hard labor’ pedagogy recurs in industrial-education debates. — connects to: Educated black elites were trained as a mediating restraint against mass violence — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 154; White-funded black higher education aimed to discipline rather than liberate — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 281
• QUESTION: Kendi’s scheme would have to classify Hampton under assimilationism (regenerating a degenerate people) vs. outright segregationism — where does ‘tutored acceptance of White supremacy’ fall?