Historically Black colleges were founded to train servants and docile cheap labor.

Evidence

Du Bois helped rouse the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement and was even more instrumental in rousing the activism of New Negro students. They protested against the remnants of the Tuskegee approach to schooling and against the efforts of all historically Black colleges that had been set up to “train servants and docile cheap labor,” as Du Bois said in a critique published in The American Mercury in October 1924. … New Negro campus activists also protested the rules of morality imposed by the colleges to regulate and civilize the supposed barbaric, oversexed, undisciplined Black students (and keep them out of harm’s way of Klansmen). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 838

Categorization

• XREF: The HBCU-as-discipline machinery is a textbook case of racist POLICY (education as labor control) producing justification, echoing the book’s core causal inversion. — connects to: Northern Baptist colleges created the educated black women who led the convention movement. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 119; Black Baptist colleges blended classical, moral, religious, and industrial training — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1226; Black schools’ industrial training was also a fiscal expedient for campus upkeep — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 169
• SEED: A possible essay: how the founding mission of HBCUs as ‘servant and docile labor’ training shaped debates over what Black education is for, from Tuskegee to today’s DEI battles.