CHAPTER 2
In a 1931 letter to Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel, Carnegie Corporation trustee James Bertram reinforced the priorities of Andrew Carnegie, and by extension, the organization throughout the Anglo-American world: “Any money which Mr. Carnegie gave to the Colonies was given for the reason that they were communities of whites.… The reason that I personally was interested in having the sphere of action of Carnegie Corporation extended to Kenya and the other high tableland country of East Africa and to South Africa is that they are, or at least are potentially, white communities. Although the Corporation has provided money which will be spent on the natives the subventions are in aid of the education problems of white communities.”1 In this letter to Keppel, Bertram explained that his support for Carnegie Corporation’s 1925 decision to allocate $37,500 for “cooperation with the British Government in educational developments in Kenya Colony” was in line with Andrew Carnegie’s intentions to assist “white communities” in the British Empire.2 Bertram reasoned that he had condoned funding education for Black people in Kenya because, once again channeling Andrew Carnegie’s intentions as a philanthropist, the organization had been addressing an educational problem of a white community in the Anglo-American world: the problem of how to educate Black people under white rule.
Focusing on Carnegie Corporation’s first grant in colonial Africa under Keppel’s leadership, this chapter argues that Keppel took a careful initial step in developing and expanding the corporation’s funding agenda in Africa. In his first grant in colonial Africa, Keppel not only relied on Bertram’s reading of Andrew Carnegie’s intentions as a funder in “white communities” in the British Empire, but he decided to fund a model of education for Black people that was well supported and advocated by his peers at the Rockefeller organizations and the Phelps Stokes Fund.3
As subsequent chapters illustrate, Keppel would become personally invested in solidifying white governance over Black people across the Atlantic and would take greater risks as a foundation leader to impose more of his personality onto the organization’s funding program in Africa. And yet, even as Keppel would expand upon his first grant in Kenya and be willing to bring into his leadership of Carnegie Corporation’s work in British Africa more of his personal preference for the social sciences as tools for white governance, he would continue to heed Bertram’s geographic and substantive restrictions. In this vein, and quite astutely for someone who aimed to remain president of Carnegie Corporation for some time, Keppel would continue to express funding preferences in colonial Africa that sat well with Bertram’s emphasis both on funding in areas of the Anglo-American world that Bertram considered sufficiently white and on projects and institutions privileging the needs of white people in these geographic regions.
With an eye towards underscoring the cautionary nature of Keppel’s first grant in colonial Africa, this chapter begins by reflecting on Andrew Carnegie’s 1907 lecture, “Negro in America.” This first section provides context for James Bertram’s depiction of Andrew Carnegie’s intentions for financing a particular model of education for Black Americans and Bertram’s confidence that Carnegie also would have supported its application among Black Africans in “white communities” of the British Empire.
1. Andrew Carnegie’s “Negro in America” (1907)
In 1907, Andrew Carnegie delivered a lecture at the Philosophical Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he indicated his reasons for funding a particular model of education for Black Americans and its relevance across the Anglo-American world. This was a perspective, again, that James Bertram later would mobilize to steer Carnegie Corporation’s funding practices in colonial Africa.4
Speaking on the “Negro in America,” Carnegie contrasted white people of the “English-speaking race” with “subject races” and explained to his Scottish audience the global relevance of his experience financing education for Black people in the United States.5 In his view, his preferred educational model for Black Americans—one promoting training in industrial and agricultural practices that would leave unchallenged white domination and Black subordination in cultural, social, and economic life—could be exported across the Anglo-American world and applied to other “subject races,” as a means of maintaining white dominance and furthering white people’s economic and political interests across these regions.
Believing that he had selected a topic that should interest any Anglo-American audience whether in New York, Boston, Edinburgh, London, or Cardiff, Carnegie told his Edinburgh audience that the education of “subject races,” from Black Americans to Egyptians, Indians, and Filipinos, was critically important for all white Britons because the form of education that white Britons chose for “subject races” long had had—and would continue to have—critical consequences for white Anglo-Americans’ continued ability to dominate them.6 As Carnegie stressed: “Education is moral dynamite which invariably explodes into rebellion. This is one of the penalties that we of the English-speaking race have to pay for our well-meant attempts to govern what are called subject races. In teaching our history, we supply them with the most deadly explosives, sure some day to burst and rend the teacher.”7
In particular, Carnegie feared that the teaching of wars, revolutions, and Anglo-American ideals of liberty—education that was presumably appropriate for white people—would backfire and lead “subject races” throughout the Anglo-American world to demand equality with white people. “Intelligence forces equal rights,” Carnegie elaborated, “hence the unrest in Egypt, India, the Philippines, and other countries under foreign tutelage is, in one sense, a wholesome sign as proving that the awakening masses are stirred to action and demand recognition as fellow-citizens, thus showing that our teaching, and especially our example, have had their inevitable and, let us never forget, their salutary effect.”8
Like a mother who was proud of her children, Carnegie noted that “the English-speaking race” could be pleased with its role in empowering some subject races toward independence across the Anglo-American world. At the same time, he contrasted this image of educated and revolutionary Egyptians, Indians, and Filipinos with Black Americans, whom he described as “a respectable, educated, intelligent race of colored citizens, increasing in numbers, possest of all civil rights, and who in turn will by honest labor remain notably the chief factor in giving the world among other things its indispensable supply of cotton.”9
As Andrew Carnegie explained in this 1907 lecture, there was nothing inherently unique to Black Americans that led them to be less revolutionary than Egyptians, Indians, and Filipinos. On the contrary, Carnegie reasoned that white Anglo-Americans’ varying approaches to these various groups’ education was the critical difference. White Americans’ bar on educating Black slaves, Carnegie reasoned, had helped leading white Americans maintain this system of enslavement. To this point, Carnegie noted that “ignorance is the only foundation upon which dominion over others can rest.”10
After the abolition of slavery in the United States, Carnegie relayed to his audience in Scotland that white Americans then had promoted a model of education among Black Americans encouraging them to find satisfaction and pride as a subjugated group, rather than in enflaming a plea for equal rights with white people. Making particular mention of two prominent U.S. schools promoting agricultural and industrial education for Black Americans—Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and Samuel Armstrong’s Hampton Institute, discussed further in this chapter—Carnegie said that this preferred educational model for Black Americans served to elevate this “subject race” gradually from slavery to full citizenship with white Americans. In the meantime, and underscoring the interests of white Anglo-Americans such as himself, Carnegie explained that this educational model prepared Black Americans to continue providing a product which Carnegie reasoned was central for the economies of the southern United States, the United States as a whole, and the world: cotton.11
Admitting that some Black Americans harbored particular intellectual talents and merited higher forms of education, Carnegie noted that “like other races that have risen, our own included, the negro is capable of producing at intervals the exceptional man who stimulates his fellows.”12 Those gifted few should have places in all professions, Carnegie allowed, though the majority of Black Americans should continue to provide the labor that they had provided the southern United States before the Civil War.13 Relatedly, Carnegie explained that the educational model for Black Americans advocated by the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes had played a significant role in helping white and Black Americans “dwell in peace” in the country.14
Celebrating the educational model that supposedly had shaped Black Americans into honest laborers uninterested in challenging white domination, Carnegie suggested in this 1907 speech that white Americans’ leading model of education for Black Americans could play a similar role in pacifying the egalitarian aspirations of other colonized groups in the Anglo-American world and in transforming these subjugated groups into reliable labor for the white “English-speaking race.”15
As James Bertram later would relay to Frederick Keppel, and as this public lecture suggests, Andrew Carnegie helped fund education for Black Americans largely as a means of furthering the economic and political interests of white people in the Anglo-American world. Because while Carnegie did verbalize concern for improving the lives of Black Americans, he never intended to challenge the economic or political interests of white Anglo-Americans. Rather, by funding education for Black Americans, as Bertram stressed and Carnegie underscored to his audience in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1907, he had aimed to provide white Anglo-Americans with a means of averting the revolutionary potential of “subject races.” And for Carnegie, applying the Tuskegee educational model for “subject races” across the Anglo-American world was key towards these ends. Much as Bertram condoned in Carnegie Corporation’s efforts to expand this grantmaking practice to colonial Africa, Andrew Carnegie’s 1907 essay indeed suggests that the philanthropist had been eager to export this educational model outside the United States, as a further effort to solidify white Anglo-Americans’ international domination.
This next section provides greater frame of reference to the dominance in the United States of the educational model for Black Americans that Andrew Carnegie celebrated in the 1907 lecture. After all, as this chapter argues, Keppel took a cautious first step in establishing a grantmaking program in British Africa, both by honoring Bertram’s reading of Carnegie’s intentions as a philanthropist in the Anglo-American world and by complementing a contemporaneous trend among his philanthropic peers to export this educational model from the United States to British Africa. It begins with a general overview of this educational model’s development in the United States.16
2. Elite U.S. Philanthropy’s Funding of Education for Black Americans
With the abolition of slavery after the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), Black Americans in the southern United States began to reconstruct their lives as free people, which included the freedom to learn how to read and write. As historian Tera Hunter writes: “Sheer survival and the reconstruction of family, despite all the difficulties, were the highest priorities of ex-slaves in the postwar period. But the desire for literacy and education was closely related to their strategies for achieving economic self-sufficiency, political autonomy, and personal enrichment.”17 Newly free families sacrificed parts of their own earnings to build schoolhouses, provide books and supplies, and pay teachers’ salaries. Without the support of their states, which increasingly were providing schooling for all white Americans, Black southerners found themselves paying for their own schooling and, at times too, leaning on the support of northern missionaries and the U.S. federal government.18
In contrast to many Black families emphasizing classical education as means for greater political and economic empowerment, wealthy white northerners with interest in supporting education for Black southerners largely sympathized with the efforts of former Union Army general and founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, Samuel Armstrong, and especially that of his student and future principal of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington.19 While these latter schools continued to underscore the importance of a strong foundation in elementary education, at least in public Washington stressed to potential white funders that this particular model of education first-and-foremost would emphasize the training of Black southerners for jobs that would not challenge white supremacy and anti-Black subordination in the region and would thus favor the economic and political interests of white people.20 As historian Emma L. Thornbrough writes: “The views expressed by Washington on education and the position of Negroes in American society and politics were so much in harmony with the views expressed by the white philanthropists who supported Tuskegee and other public men of the day that their speeches and writings frequently sound like paraphrases of each other.”21
Illustrating the developing symbiosis between the rising dominance of the Hampton-Tuskegee educational model for Black Americans in the southern United Statues and white northern philanthropists’ developing interest in funding this particular model of Black education, George Peabody established the Peabody Education Fund in 1867, a year before Samuel Armstrong founded Hampton Institute: “Convinced that education was instrumental to reconciling the North and South during the Reconstruction period, this New England merchant and banker chartered the fund to encourage ‘intellectual, moral and industrial education’ in the South and Southwest by stabilizing the public education system and fostering the growth of common schools.”22 Within ten years of operating the Peabody Education Fund, Peabody met Armstrong and was sufficiently impressed by Armstrong to accept the invitation to join the Hampton board of trustees.23
Following Armstrong’s lead, the Peabody Fund specialized in funding country schools that offered vocational and agricultural education to Black southerners and teacher training for these schools. The Peabody Fund supported Armstrong’s Hampton Institute alongside the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which Washington, a former slave and Hampton graduate, founded in Alabama in 1881. Much like the Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute trained Black teachers and officially taught practical skills that would help Black students succeed at farming and in other manual trades in the South such as construction and domestic work. Unlike Hampton’s faculty and staff, however, most of the faculty and staff at Tuskegee were Black. In an effort to advance this form of manual education for Black Americans, the Peabody Fund worked hand in hand with yet another philanthropic organization, the John F. Slater Fund, established by a textile manufacturer from Connecticut in 1882.24
In the 1860s and 1870s, Black schools controlled by missionary societies and Black religious organizations generally had been “indifferent or opposed to the Tuskegee model of industrial training,” while those funded by this network of white northern philanthropists tended to argue that this pedagogy for Black students comfortably served the interests of both former Black slaves and white leaders in the South.25 During the next decades, this latter educational model funded by key white philanthropists only gained momentum in the southern United States, though, as this chapter later explains, its meteoric rise also met with public criticism, particularly from Black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson.
A turning point in this history of competing models for Black education in the South was Booker T. Washington’s address at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. With this speech—and this national platform—he gained the attention and allegiance of even more leading white northern industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie. Faced with an audience of Black Americans and prominent whites Americans from the North and South, Washington began the speech by noting how vocational and agricultural education for Black southerners “would cement the friendship of the races and bring about hearty cooperation between them.”26
When Washington delivered his address in Atlanta, Georgia, it had been nearly two decades since white northern Republicans had withdrawn federal troops from the region.27 And since then, southern states such as Georgia had been passing laws demarcating a subordinate status for Black people and a superior one for whites. Just four years prior to Washington’s lecture in Atlanta, for example, Georgia’s legislature had passed a law allowing the city to delineate the color line “in public conveyances ‘as much as practicable.’ ”28 A year after Washington’s speech, the U.S. Supreme Court condoned such laws with its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, holding that state-imposed laws calling for the segregation of white and Black people were not necessarily discriminatory, and thus, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Speaking from the southern United States in 1895, Washington proposed the Tuskegee model of education for Black Americans as a public policy recommendation reflecting a compromise between three groups of Americans: southern whites, northern whites, and Black Americans. Likely because he was speaking in front of a white southern audience gaining both ever more dominance in the region and support from white northerners, he first addressed the fears and anxieties of southern whites. In particular, he acknowledged white southerners’ distress that education would empower Black Americans to expect equality with white Americans.
Washington took it upon himself to explain to southern whites, who had outlawed literacy and education to Black people during slavery, how and why any form of Black education was necessary. He first noted that Black people had been misguided in their efforts to achieve the same accomplishments as white people after the Civil War: “Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.”29 Placating white Americans’ anxieties that education for Black Americans would disrupt white supremacy, he echoed many white southerners’ perspectives that Black Americans would need to work their way toward proving their equality. And he noted that Black Americans could begin to do so by showing white people that they found dignity in their manual work.
Illustrating his common thinking with his white southern audience, Washington then explained that the Tuskegee model not only would help Black Americans find pride in manual labor, but also help the southern U.S. economy advance after the catastrophe of the Civil War. Washington declared to his southern white audience: “One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.”30 While acknowledging that white southerners remained hesitant to support Black Americans’ education, Washington noted that agricultural and industrial education was necessary for the region’s economic rehabilitation and growth after the Civil War.
Washington foresaw his white audience’s misgivings about Black education and emphasized that the Tuskegee model of education would not encourage Black Americans to think of themselves as equals to white Americans in the South; but rather, it would train them to accept entry-level work in southern agriculture and industry.31 Even more, he stressed that this was entry-level work that would not upset the color line that southern whites were establishing at the time, pointing out: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet, one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”32
Washington further clarified that the Tuskegee model of education not only played into the interests of southern whites, but also those of northern white industrialists. Just three years prior to Washington’s Atlanta address, for example, the deadly Homestead Strike had taken place in one of Andrew Carnegie’s steel plants near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, leaving several steelworkers and members of the Carnegie Steel Company police force dead and hundreds others in both groups injured. Historian Nell Painter explains that: “Most Americans, shocked at the bloodshed and the passion displayed by the workers, blamed the Carnegie management for provocation through wage cuts and the fortification of the mill.”33 The Pennsylvania Governor had sent 8,000 militiamen to maintain order, but the chaos continued. That summer, there was an attempted assassination of the plant manager, Henry Clay Frick; and in the early fall, numerous striking workers were indicted on 167 counts of murder, rioting, and conspiracy.34 All were found not guilty, but they had remained in jail awaiting trial for a month. While the Carnegie Steel Company succeeded in bringing an end to the strike, it was a signal that there would be equally tense labor struggles in the future.
Alluding to the fact that many strikers in this infamous strike had been white and some strikebreakers Black, Booker T. Washington further noted in his Atlanta address that northern industrialists should support the Tuskegee model of education for Black Americans because it would help strengthen a laboring class that was loyal to them. To this point, he called northern industrialists: “Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.”35 To white northerners in the audience, Washington thus stressed that Black Americans were loyal laborers who would simply serve to maximize white Americans’ profits with their continued hard work. And for these reasons, Washington urged northern industrialists, precisely such as Carnegie and his northern peers in philanthropy, to support and help fund the Tuskegee Institute and complementary groups in its orbit.
At the same time, Washington also spelled out why Black Americans should support this particular form of education. He argued that their future was in the South among southern whites, and that they should make the best of it: “To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.”36 Washington urged Black Americans to accept that they belonged in the South, that they were southerners, and that they could achieve freedom by learning “that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”37
Before Washington’s speech, northern white philanthropists such as George Peabody, John Slater, and John D. Rockefeller already had been funding the Hampton-Tuskegee educational model for Black Americans.38 In 1901, for example, the Rockefellers wrote directly to Washington and asked how they could help in expanding the work of the Tuskegee Institute throughout the South; within a few months, John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself was on a train south to visit Hampton in Virginia and Tuskegee in Alabama. “After visits to Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes and from many discussions with the school campaigners, Rockefeller, Jr., became sufficiently impressed with the Southern education movement to approach his father about establishing a new foundation to reinforce the reformers’ efforts.”39 Two years later, the Rockefellers founded the General Education Board (GEB). Though the organization was initially to be called the “Negro Education Board,” advisors close to the Rockefellers suggested that a more neutral name would not alienate white southerners as much.40 In 1903, the Rockefellers incorporated the General Education Board with the general mission of promoting education in the United States irrespective of race, sex, or creed.41
After his 1895 Atlanta speech, and in these last years of the nineteenth century, Washington also heralded Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic support and greater commitment from the Rockefellers. Since Washington in 1895 had appealed to northern industrialists by underscoring ways that the Tuskegee educational model encouraged Black Americans to be and remain docile laborers loyal to capital, it is little surprise that he attracted the attention of even more northern white industrialists, including Carnegie who only three years prior had experienced a violent labor dispute in one of his steel plants. Even more, Washington’s 1895 speech only further clarified for northern industrialists such as Carnegie how helping to fund a particular model of Black education could serve the political and economic interests of white northerners like himself and his peers who were eager to see a stronger southern—and by extension, national—economy.
In 1903, Carnegie made a substantial contribution of $600,000 to the Tuskegee Institute—a gesture further inspired by Washington’s visit to New York City that year.42 In a letter to a Tuskegee trustee published in the New York Times, Carnegie wrote: “I am satisfied that the serious race problem of the South is to be solved wisely only through Mr. Washington’s policy of education—which he seems to have been specially born—a slave among slaves—to establish and in his own day greatly to advance. Glad am I to be able to assist this good work in which you and others so zealously labor.”43
While enthusiastic about Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Carnegie never created an organization inspired by it such as the Rockefellers’ GEB; nor did he play a leading role in financing Black schools. In the early 1910s, Andrew Carnegie—and by extension, Carnegie Corporation, which inherited its founder’s funding practices in Black education—was rather on the periphery of this network of philanthropic organizations dedicated to funding Black education within and beyond the United States, further underscoring how Keppel’s decision to fund the Tuskegee educational model in Kenya in 1925 was not simply a reflection of his own organization’s priorities but, more broadly, of his peers in U.S. philanthropy.44
In the early decades of the twentieth century, after Washington’s 1895 speech, the GEB was the wealthiest philanthropy dedicated to funding education for Black Americans, and it gained the cooperation of other philanthropic organizations invested in this field, such as the older Slater and Peabody Funds and the newer Jeanes and Phelps Stokes Funds.45 The Jeanes Fund, or the “Negro Rural School Fund,” was established in 1907 by Anna T. Jeanes, a Philadelphia Quaker, who directed that the income from her estate, valued at about $1 million, be used to assist rural schools for Black Americans.46 Three years later, the GEB also gained the cooperation of the Slater Fund and the support of the Peabody Education Fund’s various state agents overseeing education in the South.47
In 1911, the Phelps Stokes Fund joined this network of foundations, and it would play a sizeable role as advocate of the Tuskegee educational model for Black Americans and Africans alike. Founded by the estate of the deceased Caroline Phelps Stokes, the fund began with the complementary goals of improving housing and education for Black Americans, Native Americans, and “deserving white students, through industrial schools, the founding of scholarships, and the erection or endowment of school buildings or chapels.”48 Within a year after its founding, though, Caroline Phelps Stokes’ nephew Anson Phelps Stokes steered the organization to focus more heavily on education than on housing. Writing to Booker T. Washington, Stokes asked him to imagine the best use of five to ten thousand dollars. In response, Washington wrote that “such a sum could be instrumental in accomplishing what he had long regarded as a necessity: distinguishing the worthy from the unworthy small denominational Negro schools.”49 Stokes took this suggestion to the organization’s trustees, and the following year, the fund’s board of trustees recorded: “The trustees, believing that such a report of existing conditions would prove invaluable to southern educators and legislators, to philanthropists interested in Negro education, to the principals and trustees of schools for colored youth, and to various educational boards, adopted the recommendations and asked the Commissioner of Education if he would accept the cooperation of the Phelps-Stokes Fund in making such a study on condition that the expenses of the agents should be paid by the fund.”50 As the trustees reasoned, such a report on schools for Black southerners would help educators, legislators, philanthropists, educational boards, principals, and trustees of schools assess the quality of high schools, colleges, and universities for Black Americans, and in the process, help steer public and private funding accordingly.
In 1912, Anson Phelps Stokes began a search for the best director of the study. Stokes had his sights particularly on the thirty-nine year-old Thomas Jesse Jones, who was a specialist in community education at the U.S. federal government’s Bureau of Education. In his correspondence with Washington, Stokes explained that “the mere fact that Dr. Jones is at present connected with the Bureau of Education and that they would in all probability allow him to continue to occupy his office there, would be an important consideration.”51 It would be a study with the full sanction and prestige of the U.S. federal government behind it.52
During the next decades, Jones’s survey of Black education—first in the United States and then in British Africa—would help this first generation of trustees and philanthropic staff at Carnegie Corporation confirm that their support of the Tuskegee educational model for Black Americans—and likewise Black Africans—was not only in line with their founder’s intentions in the Anglo-American world, but also a sound funding decision supported by their philanthropic peers in the United States.
3. Thomas Jesse Jones’s Negro Education (1917)
In the summer of 1917, the U.S. Government Printing Office delivered Thomas Jesse Jones’s two-volume survey: Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States. The survey opened with a letter from the U.S. Commissioner of Education, P. P. Claxton, and an introduction by Stokes outlining the purpose of the study.53 Jones commenced his work by discussing the importance of education for the inclusion of Black Americans in U.S. democratic life.54
Within the first page of his report, Jones mentioned Booker T. Washington—who had passed away two years earlier—and echoed this former Tuskegee principal’s arguments for a particular model of education for Black Americans. Like Washington, Jones expressed that Black Americans’ education would need to incorporate the interests of northern whites, southern whites, and Black Americans alike: “Democracy’s plan for the solution of the race problem in the Southland is not primarily in the philanthropies and wisdom of northern people; nor is it in the desires and struggles of the colored people; nor yet in the first-hand knowledge and daily contracts of the southern white people.”55 As Jones explained, white northerners, white southerners, and Black Americans needed to work together to create a comprehensive educational policy for Black Americans.
With white Americans’ interests in mind, Jones reaffirmed the value of the Tuskegee model of education for Black Americans. In Negro Education, he explained that Black Americans’ education should focus on providing them with skills adapted for the expectations and needs of rural communities in the South. Such an educational model, Jones argued, would help Black Americans learn the “sound habits of hand and head” that would help them become self-sustaining and, equally important, a well-trained and efficient labor force for white southerners. With a nod to white people in the North, and echoing the claims of Washington in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition address and Andrew Carnegie in “Negro in America” (1907), Jones stressed that educated Black labor would help strengthen the southern, and by extension the national, economies.56
Providing a “suggested program of educational development” for Black Americans from the elementary to college and professional levels, Jones argued in Negro Education that public school authorities needed to meet their obligations to educate Black Americans at the elementary level, with specific emphasis on their responsibility to increase literacy among this group of Americans: “So long as the elementary school facilities are insufficient, every kind of education above the elementary grades is seriously handicapped and the wellbeing of the community is endangered.”57 Beyond the attainment of literacy at the elementary level, Jones released his pressure on public school authorities and entertained the possibility of public and private options for Black Americans’ higher learning.
With respect to secondary schools, he considered their main purpose to be training teachers for elementary education and believed that private philanthropists and public school authorities could continue working together in achieving this end.58 Moreover, Jones argued that agricultural and mechanical schools could help expose Black students to useful knowledge about “gardening, small farming, and the simple industries required in farming communities.”59 Those educated in these trades, he explained, could go on and apply their knowledge on farms, for example, or teach other adults. Presumably those who had received secondary school education would teach similar subjects, but to children in elementary schools.
The highest level of education in Jones’s educational program for Black Americans included college and professional education. Much as in the other two levels, Jones argued that this form of education should reflect the needs of the pupil and the community. Since a segregated society required Black doctors, teachers, and religious leaders, he stressed that Black colleges should provide for their training.60
After outlining this comprehensive policy for Black Americans’ education, Negro Education offered an extensive survey of private elementary schools and public and private education above the elementary level in the South (with a final chapter on some select Black institutions in the North). In this second volume of the two-volume study, Jones presented a chapter on each southern state, with each individual chapter including a summary and assessment of the public and private educational facilities that he and his team of investigators had visited between 1913 and 1915.
4. Jones, U.S. Philanthropy, and the Tuskegee Model
Within two years after the publication of Negro Education—and in a move that only would increase Jones’s influence among foundation leaders—Jones ceased working for the U.S. federal government and became the Phelps Stokes Fund’s education director.61
Just months prior to the publication of Negro Education, the U.S. Senate had passed a resolution requesting the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Education to disclose any funds it received from private organizations such as the Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies. Given their Gilded Age capitalist founders, long viewed by many Americans as industry titans undermining the abilities of the U.S. working classes to thrive, legislators distrusted these groups’ intentions in helping the U.S. public. On March 3, 1917, the U.S. Congress provided that “no Government official or employee shall receive any salary in connection with his services as such an official or employee from any source other than the Government of the United States, except as may be contributed out of the treasury of any State, county, or municipality.”62 No longer could philanthropies directly pay the salaries of sitting government employees such as Thomas Jesse Jones.
The U.S. commissioner of education experienced some level of worry about this development, and so too did Jones, who admitted to Anson Phelps Stokes that “there is too, the possibility that it may be well for us to withdraw from the bureau before some erratic Congressman has had an opportunity to suggest that we should withdraw.”63 Before Congress took any further steps to curtail philanthropy-government collaboration, Jones accepted a position at the Phelps Stokes Fund.
Under Jones’s leadership, a network of philanthropic organizations including the Phelps Stokes Fund, the GEB, Carnegie Corporation, and smaller auxiliary philanthropic organizations such as the Rosenwald, Slater, and Jeans Funds coordinated with each other and with U.S. state and local officials in furthering a model of industrial and agricultural education for Black Americans well into the 1930s.64
In this way, this first generation of professional foundation staff members in the United States could reason that their continued support of this model of education for Black Americans was not simply a continuation of their founders’ funding practices, but was also based on modern empirical research provided by Jones. That said, Jones’s research not only had its supporters but also its vocal critics, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson.65
Historian and editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis, Du Bois reviewed Jones’s report in the magazine’s February 1918 issue.66 Showcasing his disapproval of the project, Du Bois wrote that fellow Black people and “persons who know the problem of educating the American Negro will regard the Jones’ report, despite its many praiseworthy features, as a dangerous and in many respects unfortunate publication.”67 As Du Bois detailed, this was because Jones’s study further cemented the already-dominant insistence “on manual training, industrial education, and agricultural training” among Black Americans in the region.68 More specifically, Du Bois wrote:
This is an unfortunate and dangerous proposal for the simple reason that the great dominating philanthropic agency, the General Education Board, long ago surrendered to the white South by practically saying that the educational needs of the white South must be attended to before any attention should be paid to the education of Negroes: that the Negro must be trained according to the will of the white South and not as the Negro desires to be trained. It is this board that is spending more money today in helping Negroes learn how to can vegetables than in helping them to go through college.69
Under such a policy carried out by leading U.S. philanthropies, Du Bois predicted that Black Americans would have few options in traditional, liberal arts, and civic-minded education. Even when a few Black Americans could amass the funds to establish such schools, Du Bois also noted that a teacher financed by these foundations was probably not far away trying to change its curriculum.70 In fact, Du Bois rightly foresaw that Jones’s recommendations would lead to further entrenchment of white philanthropists’ theory that a particular type of vocational and agricultural education for Black Americans was key to improving the condition of Black Americans in the South, and even more importantly to them, to improving the economic strength of the region and country.
Much like Du Bois, Black historian Carter Woodson perceived that the 1917 study was a menacing tool that could potentially undermine the proper education of Black Americans in the South. Woodson also acknowledged that some Americans had received the report with open arms. In “1917 assembled in Washington the outstanding Negro educators to discuss the two-volume report,” Woodson recalled. “Some of the educators assembled who had given their approval took pride in defending it as a great achievement.”71 Referring to the conference that Commissioner of Education Claxton had organized in D.C. months after the publication of Negro Education, Woodson reflected nearly two decades later in 1936 the significance of Jones’s project and its impact among powerful Americans shaping Black Americans’ education: “The worst of all the results of his biased report was that the system of education which it endorsed produced a mis-educated class of Negroes who are the greatest liability of the race.”72
Woodson wrote these reflections on Thomas Jesse Jones’s Negro Education nearly two decades after its publication, and in the context of protesting Du Bois’s decision in the 1930s to collaborate with elite white foundations—and particularly the foundation funding Jones—in organizing and planning an “Encyclopedia for the Negro.” In his open letter addressed to the network of northern philanthropies considering collaboration with the Phelps Stokes Fund and Du Bois, Woodson would make public his disappointment in Du Bois’s decision to collaborate with a foundation they both long had criticized for its corrosive role in the lives of Black Americans. In writing such an open letter, Woodson viewed himself as being consistent in his stance against the Phelps Stoke Fund. By contrast, he argued that Du Bois—whom he outed in this open letter for once calling Jones “that evil genius of the Negro race”—had compromised his integrity as a Black scholar in “the hope of a few dollars.”73
As Du Bois once imagined and Woodson continued to press well into the 1930s, Jones’s report on Black education in the United States strengthened the perception of white philanthropists and of their organizations’ staff and trustees that the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education for Black Americans was worth supporting. Building upon his open letter to northern philanthropies in 1936 and just weeks after Jones’s passing in January 1950, historian Woodson wrote in the Journal of Negro History: “Jones’s judgment led most Negroes to consider him an evil in the life of the Negro; but he was nevertheless, catapulted into fame among the capitalists and government officials supporting the education of Negroes. They made Jones the almoner of the despised race with the title of Educational Director of the Phelps Stokes Fund which he served from 1913 to 1946. When he said do not give here and do not help yonder the ‘philanthropic’ element heeded his biddings.”74
During the 1910s and well into the next two decades, this first generation of white U.S. philanthropic trustees and staff members found in the recommendations of Jones’s Negro Education legitimation for their founders’ funding patterns in Black education. As Du Bois and Woodson watched on in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones and his educational model for Black Americans gained greater traction in the United States and across the Atlantic.
5. Jones and Carnegie Corporation’s 1925 Grant to Kenya
In 1919, Jones and the Phelps Stokes Fund’s trustees brainstormed their next steps. Having served abroad during the First World War and “in connection with Y.M.C.A. education work among negro troops,”75 Jones drew from his experience when he wrote to the Phelps Stokes Fund trustees that “consciousness of the international responsibility of America is the deepest and most abiding impression that comes to the American who has any contact with the leaders of thought and action in Europe during these thrilling days of reconstruction.”76 Jones thus advised that the Phelps Stokes Fund should extend its purview beyond the United States. To this end, Jones referred to the London-based secretary of the International Missionary Council (IMC), J. H. Oldham, who had reviewed Jones’s Negro Education in the pages of the International Review of Missions and had suggested the utility of the Jones Report for British Africa.77 Jones added in his letter to the fund trustees: “The implication of these appreciative words is that the fund should become a center of information on Christian education in mission fields, that we should help mission boards and colonial boards of education to understand the methods so successful in the education of the Negroes in our southern states.”78
Following Jones’s lead, the Phelps Stokes Fund in the 1920s began to collaborate with missionary societies and the British Colonial Office in much the same way it had in the 1910s with the U.S. Bureau of Education in Washington, D.C: by producing surveys of educational facilities for Black people authored by Thomas Jesse Jones.79
Jones’s first African survey, Education in Africa: A Study of West, South, and Equatorial Africa by the African Education Commission, under the Auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and Foreign Mission Societies of North America and Europe (1922), presented the findings that he and his team of missionary and education experts had collected while traveling throughout West and southern Africa in 1920. With the principal mission of assessing the effects that European models of education were having on African communities, the research team analyzed “how education could be more adequately related to the physical and cultural conditions of African life.”80 Aside from Jones, the commission included several Europeans and one Black African, Dr. J. E. Kwegyir Aggrey of the British Gold Coast. At times called the “Father of African Education” or the “Booker T. Washington of Africa,” Aggrey was then a faculty member at Livingstone College in North Carolina and had met Thomas Jesse Jones a decade earlier during a YMCA event in Virginia.81 “Aggrey was chosen because he was an outspoken supporter of the Tuskegee philosophy of education,” writes historian Sylvia M. Jacobs, and because he had the “reputation as a person who could work with both blacks and whites.”82
In Education in Africa, Jones addressed an audience of white Europeans skeptical of Black Africans’ humanity and of the value of educating them. He was speaking, that is, not so much to white missionaries, who had long had supported efforts to educate Black Africans, but members of the British Colonial Office and white settlers throughout Africa. Accordingly, he argued that schooling would help Black Africans advance from their supposed lower stage of civilization toward the presumably higher stage of white civilization. To this point, Jones stressed: “their folk-lore, their handicrafts, their Native music, their forms of government, their linguistic powers, all are substantial evidences of their capacity to respond to the wise approaches of civilization so that they may share in the development of the African continent.”83 Here, he also drew on his work in the United States, writing that the “future possibilities of the African Natives may be somewhat forecast by the success of Negroes in other parts of the world, notably in America, where the descendants of the Africans are living in such large numbers.”84 Jones argued that, like other human beings around the world, Black Africans were capable of evolving into a higher “rank of civilization.”85 Though he also noted that this would take time because Black Africans were so much less advanced than the “most advanced race.”86 Jones underscored in Education in Africa that white Europeans and white Americans in Africa were having a positive influence on Africans. Far from thinking that white people were an unwelcomed element in Africa, Jones explained that the presence of white missionaries, colonial governments, and settlers had brought greater gains than losses to native Black Africans.
That said, Jones also suggested that white people should amend Black Africans’ education to reflect the needs and interests of white missions, governments, commercial concerns, and Black Africans alike.87 To make this point, Jones made explicit mention of the late Booker T. Washington and how Washington’s model of education for Black Americans could serve as an example in Africa: “Booker Washington’s life and work personify the methods, the principles, and the ideals necessary for those who would work for and with Africans. Most of all must the Africans themselves be guided and inspired by these ideals if they would participate in the salvation of their great continent.”88 Whether in Africa or the United States, Jones proposed that the Tuskegee model of education could serve the educational interests of Black people and the financial and political interests of white people.
Reflecting on Jones’s views, scholar Edward H. Berman writes: “Education for the African masses—as for the Negro masses—was to be simple, utilitarian, and rooted to a strong agricultural bias. For the native leadership there would be, first, training for teachers and religious workers; second, instruction for those who would specialize in agriculture and industry; and third, training for those who would enter the professions of medicine, theology, engineering, and law.”89 Even for elite Africans, Berman continued, “there would be a strong emphasis on agricultural and simple industrial subjects, hygiene and sanitation, gardening and rural economics before the professional training commenced.”90
In 1922, the New York Times reviewed Education in Africa and called Jones an “entirely impartial” researcher “setting forth the future of the African races.”91 It also celebrated Jones’s efforts to export the Tuskegee model of education to Africa and apply it to Africans: “What Dr. Jones has done is to bring to bear upon Africa the ideals and experience associated with the great colleges of Hampton and Tuskegee.”92
But there were also critics. In correspondence with Oldham, for example, former East African medical officer Norman Leys shared his impressions of Jones whom he presumably already had met in London. Leys wrote to Oldham:
I pressed Jesse Jones to tell me whether he thought American negroes as a whole different in nature and capacity from the Europeans they live among and whether he expected from them a different kind of future. He admitted that he did. I told him that explained everything, to me, of his differences with du Bois and others. If a stable boy is going to be a king some day he has no less need to learn how to sweep the stable well. But stable sweeping should be taught as training for kingly duties. Jones in effect says it isn’t wise, it isn’t sensible, to teach a negro child what European children are taught because as men they will have a different status. That is not relatively but absolutely contrary to Matt. XXV 40 & 45, and St. Paul’s directions to Philemon.93
A Christian Socialist, Leys believed that all Christians were obligated to subscribe to the inherent equality among all human beings. Though Leys did not advocate for white Europeans to leave Africa, he did emphasize that they had an obligation to educate Black Africans as they would fellow white people.94
Clearly aware that Oldham admired Jones, Norman Leys tried to illustrate in his letter to Oldham the differences between Jones’s approach to Black education and Du Bois’s own, which Leys thought better mirrored the Bible’s lessons for white people’s treatment of Black people.95 Leys thus reasoned to Oldham that Jones’s educational policy revealed the latter’s belief that Black people across the Atlantic should be prepared for an inferior status in white societies. Leys also noted to his British colleague that Jones seemed unaware that his educational policy went contrary to the Christian teachings of treating the poorest brethren as one would treat Christ himself.96
On his end, Oldham largely perceived Leys to be an idealist and himself and Jones to be realists on best practices in colonial African administration. Considering that Leys had lived in colonial Africa for sixteen years whereas Oldham then had never visited the continent and Jones had merely spent a year there, Oldham’s perception of himself and Jones as realists and Leys as idealist is puzzling. Regardless, Oldham remained confident in Jones’s proposed educational model for Black Africans and brought it to the attention of the British Colonial Office. In 1923, in anticipation of the imperial education conference scheduled for the summer of 1925, Oldham wrote to under-secretary of state for the colonies, William Ormsby-Gore, and requested an opportunity to discuss education in Africa.97 Within weeks, Jones was back in London for a conference with the British Colonial Office and key governors on educational policy.98
The attendees of this meeting decided to form a “Permanent Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa,” which would be located in London.99 Ormsby-Gore subsequently argued in the House of Commons that it was vital for the British government to concern itself with Africans’ education and to arrive at a coherent educational policy in the process. Here, he pointed to Jones’s Education in Africa as a guide: “We were led to this largely as the result of a most extraordinary and interesting report issued by Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones, who has traveled not only through British colonies but through French Africa, Belgian Congo and Portuguese colonies. He has made a most helpful contribution to the subject of African education from the point of view of the native. It is hoped that Dr. Jones may pay a similar visit to the East African colonies.”100 Accordingly, the British Colonial Office invited him to conduct a second survey.
Like the first study, Education in East Africa (1925) was financed by the Phelps Stokes Fund. And, as in the first study, Jones cast the potential for Africa in positive terms, writing that “it is inevitable that the honest observer shall present Africa as a Continent of Great Opportunities and Greater Responsibilities.”101 Unlike his first two studies, however, in which Jones verbalized some effort to consider the interests of Black people along with those of various groups of white people, Education in East Africa (1925) did not consider the voices, interests, and aspirations of Black Africans. Insofar as Jones expressed concern for Black Africans, he did so in the broadest terms, mentioning that government, missions, and settlers could all agree that “the conditions and needs of the community must be vital considerations in all efforts for improvement” of education.”102
Before the publication of Jones’s second survey, the British government hosted a dinner in his honor. At the dinner, Jones spoke on behalf of the Phelps Stokes Fund and reciprocated the admiration he had been receiving among leading British officials: “We are all greatly delighted by the dinner to be given by ‘His Britannic Majesty’s Government to meet the Chairman of the Phelps-Stokes Education Commission to Africa.’ I spent last night at Mr Oldham’s and conferred with him at length as to my address in response to the toasts being given by Major Ormsby-Gore and Sir Michael Sadler.”103 Ormsby-Gore was, of course, the under-secretary of state for the colonies. Sadler was an academic and former head of a commission who had surveyed education in India.104
Within months of the publication of Education in East Africa (1925), the Permanent Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa, which included Ormsby-Gore, Sadler, Oldham, and several other representatives from the British government and missionary circles, produced its first white paper, entitled Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa.105 Writing in the International Review of Missions that year, Oldham celebrated the Secretary of State’s decision to issue this report outlining the native educational policy proposed by Jones.106 The British government had yet to allocate funds to implement the policy; however, with this white paper, it expressed formal approval of it. In the United States, the New York Times published a review of Jones’s second African survey in which it once again described Jones as the quintessential objective observer: “Dr. Jones displays a remarkably sound judgment. About his opinions, there is nothing of mere emotion.”107 During the 1910s and 1920s, many leading white Anglo-Americans in journalism, as well as government and philanthropy, would determine Jones’s prescriptions for Black Americans’ and Black Africans’ education to be reasonable and sound.
6. Building on Carnegie Corporation’s 1925 Grant to Kenya
In the spring of 1925, Thomas Jesse Jones met with Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel at the corporation’s offices in New York City. Encouraging the organization to extend education grants in colonial Africa—the corporation had made the grant to Kenya earlier that year—Jones noted to Keppel that his reports on African education were then available.108 Based on these conversations, Keppel already had read Jones’s second report on East Africa, a report further confirming for this relatively new president of Carnegie Corporation that his first grant in British Africa conformed not only to Bertram’s vision of the organization’s geographic and substantive scope abroad, but also to prevailing recommendations among his peers in philanthropy.
During the next decade, Carnegie Corporation would collaborate with Jones and the Phelps Stokes Fund in advocating segregated agricultural and industrial education for Black people in the United States and throughout British Africa. In this vein, for example, the organization funded five “Jeanes schools” for teacher training in Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and possibly too Nyasaland. Modeled after U.S. schools financed by the Jeanes Fund, these “Jeanes schools” were training schools for teachers who would go on to educate African students in the industrial and agricultural trades promoted by the Tuskegee model.109 Years later, Keppel concluded that “in British Africa, nothing has proved more interesting than the development of Jeanes Schools for the natives as a factor in racial and cultural adjustments.”110
In 1925, after this first cautious step in launching a funding practice in colonial Africa that would sit well with his board’s vision of Andrew Carnegie’s intentions as a philanthropist and complement too other peer organizations’ funding practices in the field, Keppel became intrigued by other funding opportunities on the continent. Some months after his meeting with Jones, Keppel met with another fellow Phelps Stokes adviser, J. H. Oldham. Much to the chagrin of Jones and the Phelps Stokes Fund more broadly, Oldham would encourage Keppel to fund research in the social sciences.111 Even more, and as the next chapters illustrate, Oldham soon would overshadow Jones as Keppel’s principal adviser on Africa.
In fact, and in leaning on Oldham, Keppel would move beyond the work of his U.S. philanthropic peers (and Andrew Carnegie’s own explicit recommendation that the Tuskegee educational model was the panacea for strengthening white Anglo-American domination and the subservience of “subject races” throughout the Anglo-American world) in favor of also financing social science research as a critical tool for achieving complementary ends.
James Bertram would condone Keppel’s decision, though he would continue to stress to Keppel that Andrew Carnegie had intended to finance projects within and for white communities. Against the backdrop of institutional imperatives to privilege the needs of white communities in the Anglo-American world, Keppel would fund cooperative studies within and for white communities in colonial Africa and then the United States. And in the process, he would further develop a perspective of his own on the critical value of the social sciences for solidifying international order after the First World War: a vision of world order that presumed the value of fortifying white Anglo-American leadership and Black subjection across oceans.