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Chapter 5 presents a comprehensive and innovative analysis of extracurricular sports for undergraduate women between the 1920s and 1950s. Why did some colleges and universities approve high-level female competition, while others opposed it? Why did like-minded physical educators at similar institutions reach different conclusions about women’s athletics? The chapter argues that both national and local factors played a role. As higher education and student populations changed, each institution’s mission and identity, demographic makeup, donor base, governance structure, and campus culture produced distinctive practices of “difference” along axes of gender, race, and class; these frameworks either facilitated or disallowed women’s athletics. The analysis includes case studies of diverse schools, including Agnes Scott, Milwaukee-Downer, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Stanford, Hampton, Tuskegee, and Spelman.

Chapter 1 opens with a brief history of physical education as a profession in the United States from the 1890s through 1940s. It then focuses on white and black women who became gym teachers during these decades: their upbringing, interests, training, employment, work-related challenges (such as inadequate resources, facilities, and administrative authority), professional activities, and personal lives. As second-class members of a new, seemingly non-academic field, early female physical educators emphasized notions of gender to accommodate as well as resist the disadvantages they faced at educational institutions. The chapter includes biographical sketches of prominent and lesser-known women; data on the careers and marital status of physical education graduates of several Midwestern universities; and detailed descriptions of the hiring process at Hampton Institute and Spelman College.

Chapter two reconstructions the origins of black folklore studies at the Hampton Institute, with the first folklore collections conducted in 1878 under the auspices of Samuel Armstrong, the Institute’s founder, and later reinvigorated by Alice Bacon and carried out by the Hampton Folklore Society (1893-1900). This chapter posits the influential role Armstrong played in establishing a reformist/assimilationist agenda for black folklore studies, expanding this context to consider the relationship between Armstrong’s early missionary work in Hawaii and his later visions for folklore studies at Hampton. The second half of the chapter considers how the Hampton Folklore Society, under Bacon’s direction, became a site where the larger community, both black and white, engaged in dialogue and debate about the meaning and significance of black folklore.

The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.

This chapter examines popular print culture, performance, and federal policy as a ‘self-reinforcing circuit’ of representation that trained Native American students at the Hampton Institute for ‘citizenship’. Hampton, located near Jamestown, Virginia, is best known for its work among African Americans, but as early as 1870 Samuel Chapman Armstrong launched a campaign to recruit American Indians to the school. This chapter explores Armstrong’s use of newspapers and magazines to influence public opinion and policy as well as generate support for his educational project. It shows how popular print culture positioned Hampton’s educational experiment in dialogue with the debates over American Indian policy.

This chapter presents the article “The Kind of Education the Afro-American Most Needs,” published in Hampton Institute's Southern Workman, where Fortune emphasized the importance of industrial education. This idea was promoted by schools such as Hampton and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and by Fortune himself in his 1884 Black and White. As in his argument laid out in Black and White, Fortune did not undervalue the necessity of higher education but rather called for both to be employed for the betterment of the race.

The first chapter traces Davis’s social and intellectual influences in the first third of his life, from 1902 to 1931. In 1902, Davis was born into a relatively affluent black family in Washington, D.C. Though his family suffered from Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government, Allison nevertheless achieved a first-rate education from Dunbar High School and was firmly part of the black middle class. After graduating as valedictorian, Davis studied English literature at Williams College from 1920 to 1924, again graduating as valedictorian. Then, he completed a master’s degree in English literature from Harvard College in 1925, where he was influenced by the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt. In 1925, Davis took a job as a professor of English at Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he worked until 1931. During these years, he contributed to the New Negro Renaissance while encouraging students to protest the administrative paternalism at Hampton and other white-run black colleges.

In this essay, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai argues that the American Civil War strengthened rather than weakened three college-educated individuals’ commitment to lessons about gentlemanly character. Additionally, the war reinforced these men’s nationalistic tendencies. Examining the postwar educational careers of Joshua Chamberlain (Bowdoin College), Oliver Howard (Howard University and Lincoln Memorial University), and Samuel Armstrong (Hampton Institute), the essay notes how all three attempted to instill virtues of manly character in their students. Each faced different challenges: Chamberlain and Howard respectively confronted critics and opponents from the student body and southern whites whereas Armstrong traded freedmen’s civil rights for industrial skills.

The first half of 1884 was a busy period in the life of the Colored Orphan Asylum (COA). Despite its early intent to care specifically for orphans, the institution now had more half-orphans and destitute or neglected children than orphans. To better reflect the mission of an institution that also admitted children sent by magistrates for delinquency, a new name was in order. Consequently, the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans in the City of New York became, effective on July 1, 1884, the COA and Association for the Benefit of Colored Children. The task of finishing the building, a duty that had eluded the managers for nearly two decades, was greatly aided by the $10,225 legacy of Samuel Willets and the sale of railroad bonds. The institution reached a milestone at the end of 1885 and a few fortunate ones were sent to Hampton Normal Institute in Virginia.

Stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were a staple of theaters across the United States well into the twentieth century. In 1876, after jubilee troupes had become a national craze, George Howard and his wife Caroline added a jubilee troupe to their stage production, setting off a new trend. Soon jubilee singers were a prerequisite for every “Tom” production. This chapter examines the role of black singers in the show, using Howard’s revision of George Aiken’s script as well as reviews, and lists the spirituals used in the initial productions. A symbiosis between Tom shows and jubilee troupes developed, with jubilee troupes increasingly adding ethnographic portrayals of slave life to their concerts. Soon other plays that had a more tangential relation to plantation life (or none at all) began incorporating jubilee singers. Meantime, the Hyers sisters and Elizabeth Hopkins mounted musical plays that incorporated spirituals as well as cultivated music. Minstrel managers attempted a new level of “verisimilitude” in theatrical representations of slave life and music, constructing outdoor plantations and holding performances in slave cabins and cotton fields, as well as on nearby stages.

This chapter focuses on Harriet Georgiana James and her correspondence. Harriet, born on May 10, 1879, died of consumption before the age of twenty-three. Consumption had begun to ravage her lungs even before she arrived at Hampton Institute and Normal School, but she remained “cheerful, hopeful, and ambitious, she did not seem to see the dark side of her illness at all.”

This chapter examines the work of a former Hampton student who also traveled to the Congo in 1890 as cofounder of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM). Sheppard’s articles and speeches circulated widely through networks of HBCUs, the press, and the church. In particular, his 1899 eyewitness report on the brutal practice of hand-severing became a foundational document for Congo Reform Association (CRA) activists like E. D. Morel and Mark Twain. Sheppard’s writings tell a different story than canonical literary portraits of the region like Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness by exhibiting an appreciation for the voices of the Congolese people, a point which was emphasized when, after being charged with libel by the colonial authorities, Sheppard arranged for Congolese witnesses to testify in his defense. After his forced retirement from the APCM in 1910, he continued to work on behalf of the Congo, speaking to prominent audiences throughout the United States.

As jubilee troupes multiplied and grew in popularity, minstrels and variety performers began to burlesque their performances by using songs modeled on spirituals, which I call commercial spirituals. These came in three broad categories: parodies of specific spirituals (including contrafacta), popular songs modeled on the musical style and content of spirituals, and popular songs whose lyrics (but not their musical style) alluded to spirituals. Bryant’s Minstrels was an early blackface troupe that parodied the spiritual “Gospel Train,” under the title “Get Aboard Little Children.” Other minstrel and variety performers parodied specific troupes of jubilee singers; they became known generically as the “Hamtown Students” or a variation on that name. This chapter examines specific song parodies by burlesque jubilee troupes, informed by newspaper reviews and the Ham-Town Students Songster, which contains words and music. Performances by both white minstrel performers and black performers are considered, with particular attention to the Georgia Minstrels.

This chapter focuses on Harold Edward James and his correspondence. Harold, born on February 3, 1884, had a loving, generous nature and a lively sense of humor. He enrolled at Hampton Institute at the age of fifteen and found his calling working at the school’s eight-hundred-acre farm at Shellbanks, where students earned money to pay their tuition and produced food that the school sold to supplement its income. After leaving Hampton, Harold bought and operated a farm in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and later became the manager of a school in Hanover, Virginia.