In this Virginia History Blog, we begin with “Virginia in the Vanguard”, a look at political leadership over the last 20 years of the 20th century and “Global Perspectives” investigates the economic development of the South through the 19th and 20th centuries.
“A Class of Their Own” examines black educational history over the century of 1870 to 1970, “The Rosenwald Schools” documents the expansion and adoption of black schools throughout the rural South 1912-1933.
“Civil Rights and Politics at Hampton Institute” is an account of the changes and influence of one of Virginia’s predominantly black universities, and “Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance” is from a diary of a prominent Richmond segregationist lawyer of the time.
Current releases related to Virginia history in other eras from Spring 2018 journals can be found in previous Virginia History Blogs at Colonial Virginia – Spring 2018, Revolutionary Virginia – Spring 2018, and Civil War Virginia – Spring 2018, and New South and Modern Virginia – Spring 2018.
Virginia in the Vanguard
Frank B. Atkinson wrote Virginia in the Vanguard: Political Leadership in the 400-Year-Old Cradle of American Democracy, 1981-2006 in 2006. It is available from the Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, on Kindle and online new and used.
By the period from 1981 to 2006, Virginia politics was removed from the narrow racial focus of mid-century massive resistance. Instead it became “a frequent harbinger of national trends”, anticipating the success of centrist Democrats and innovative Republican legislative agendas.
Virginia’s growing suburbs became increasingly influential, fiscally conservative while rejecting social conservatives. Both Republicans in the 1980s and Democrats in the 1990s were plagued with internal feuds. Politicians diverging from campaign promises after they were elected on both sides endangered “a bond of trust” between voters and their elected officials.
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Global Perspectives … in the American South
Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie edited Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South in 2005. It is available from the University of Missouri Press and online new and used.
In this collection of essays, the South is economically re-conceptualized. Instead of a region of stagnation, backwardness and lack of innovation, the South is pictured as economically prosperous and socially dynamic. The antebellum South may have lagged behind the North and Great Britain, but it was more industrially developed than most nations of the world.
Beginning in the 1830s, southerners sought to lessen their economic dependency on the North by developing infrastructure and increasing European and other international networks. But many of the southern elite gained prosperity with agriculture alone, and so lacked the political will to overcome geographic barriers to industrialization. Nevertheless, the South’s development compares favorably to the 19th and 20th industrial performance of western states and western Europe.
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A Class of Their Own
Adam Fairclough wrote A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South in 2007. It is available from the Belknap Press and online new and used.
The book presents a synthesis of southern black educational history spanning the century from 1870 to 1970. It focuses on the contributions of African American educators in the context of Jim Crow limitations. While there were many variables from state to state, the era of segregation in the South was a distinct historical epoch with a beginning, middle, and end.
Efforts to educate black children extended to both public and private institutions. Northern philanthropy contributed and there were differences between urban and rural schooling. Training and curriculum changed over time, and black teachers assumed roles as community leaders and racial diplomats. Yet the collegiate education teachers received could estrange them from their constituents, and leadership battles could develop between both local ministers and teachers, and black teachers and the NAACP.
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The Rosenwald Schools
Mary S. Hoffschwelle wrote The Rosenwald Schools of the American South in 2006. It is available from the University Press of Florida and online new and used.
By 1932 over five thousand schools for 663,315 rural African American students had been initiated across the American South. It was accomplished by a partnership between black self-help communities raising matching funds raising 17%, the philanthropy of the president of the Sears, Roebuck and Company retail chain through the Julius Rosenald Fund contributing 15%, and paternalistic rural communities persuaded to pay out more than $18 million for segregated school houses.
Beginning in 1912, Julius Rosenwald responded to Booker T. Washington’s appeal initially by placing administrators at Tuskegee Institute in charge building to plans drawn up there. In 1920 Samuel L. Smith of Nashville, Tennessee administered the Fund to help negotiate adoption of the schools into each local county school system. Edwin R. Embree began in 1927 to redirect the resources from merely a building program to teacher training and salaries, transportation and vocational facilities. The Fund ended with its stock collapse in the Great Depression, but its goals became a focus of the NAACP’s campaign for educational equality in the 1930s.
Civil Rights and Politics at Hampton Institute.
To buy “The Rosenwald Schools” at Amazon, click here.
Civil Rights and Politics at Hampton Institute
Hoda M. Zaki wrote Civil Rights and Politics at Hampton Institute: The Legacy of Alonzo G. Moron. It is available from the University of Illinois Press and online new and used.
At the height of Jim Crow Virginia through the 1940s, Hampton Institute focused on providing a service-based curriculum leading to degrees in industrial arts and agriculture. With the inauguration of Alonzo G. Moron in 1949, the college appointed more blacks to administrative positions, and the intellectual purpose of the school was refocused to liberal arts and civil rights advocacy.
Along with other black college presidents such as Benjamin E. Mays (Morehouse College in Atlanta), Charles S. Johnson (Fisk University’s first black president, 1947) and Mary McLeod Bethune (Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach), Moron used his position to publicly oppose segregation, lynching and poverty. He defined “political engagement” as both the “exercise of the franchise and the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights”. He was an “incrementalist”, but his stance for academic leadership, social work and political activism led to his becoming a controversial figure and his untimely ouster in 1959.
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Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance
James R. Sweeny wrote Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance: The Diary of David J. Mays, 1954-1959 in 2008. It is available from the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
David J. Mays, a Richmond lawyer, state legislature lobbyist and Pulitzer prize winner for his biography of Edmond Pendleton, 1721-1803, became the legal council to the Virginia Public Education Commission (the [State Senator] Gray Commission) appointed by the General Assembly in 1955 to formulate a formal response to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision to integrate schools. This diary contributes our understanding of massive resistance to racial integration of public schools in Virginia. Massive resistance was a rallying cry rather than a program or strategy. Segregationists had competing interests among themselves.
Mays early came to the conclusion that school integration was inevitable, and the only reasonable course was to delay. Others actually believed marshaling state resources could overturn the Supreme Court ruling, and these included U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., Governors Thomas B. Stanley and J. Almond Jr., and Virginia Senator Garland Gray. The moderate Gray Commission report was superseded by more extreme provisions of the Stanley Plan and Almond’s decision to close public schools after Mays was excluded from the process. Mays defended Virginia in court against the NAACP desegregation suit against the state, and later chaired the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, devoted to developing information related to states rights in their federal relationship with the national government.
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Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Gilded Age, New South and 20th Century. Titles are organized by topics, political and economic Virginia, social history, gender, religious, African American, and Wars in Virginia 1750-1824.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.