Berea College-Coeducationally and Racially Integrated: an Unlikely Contingency in the 1850S Richard E

Eastern Kentucky University Encompass Curriculum and Instruction Faculty and Staff Curriculum and Instruction Scholarship January 2012 Berea College-Coeducationally and Racially Integrated: An Unlikely Contingency in the 1850s Richard E. Day Eastern Kentucky University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://encompass.eku.edu/ci_fsresearch Part of the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons Recommended Citation Day, Richard E., R Cleveland, and J Hyndman. (2012) Berea College-coeducationally and racially Integrated: An unlikely contingency in the 1850s. The Journal of Negro Education, 82 (1), 35-46. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Curriculum and Instruction at Encompass. It has been accepted for inclusion in Curriculum and Instruction Faculty and Staff choS larship by an authorized administrator of Encompass. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Journal of Negro Education, 82 (1), 35-46 Berea College—Coeducationally and Racially Integrated: An Unlikely Contingency in the 1850s Richard Day Eastern Kentucky University Roger Cleveland Eastern Kentucky University June O. Hyndman Georgetown College Don C. Offutt Gear Up of Kentucky The anti-slavery ministry of Rev. John G. Fee and the unlikely establishment of Berea College in Kentucky in the 1850s, the first college in the southern United States to be coeducationally and racially integrated, are examined to further understand the conditions surrounding these extraordinary historical events. The Berea case illustrates how early twentieth century legal institutions were suffused with racism and justifications for racial discrimination even to the extent that they neutered the laws intended to provide redress to Black citizens, while the court approved of racial prejudice as a natural protection from what it considered to be an unnatural amalgamation. Keywords: social gospel, abolitionist, emancipationist, Radical Abolitionist Party, the Day Law INTRODUCTION In 1841, Reverend John Gregg Fee (1816-1901) received a $200 commission from the American Missionary Association (AMA). This amount was meant to help sustain Fee, an advocate of free labor, as he went about his work in Bracken County, Kentucky, teaching and preaching in the social gospel tradition. Fee lived in a “little frame house” which served as school, church, and residence. Fee’s congregation soon grew to twenty-one souls and the congregation decided to build a larger church; brick—for security reasons—as Fee had come under regular attack by local pro-slavery forces. In 1847, Fee severed his ties with the Presbyterian Church and began a nonsectarian, anti- slavery ministry. Fee challenged his congregation; “Shall the seats be free? If when the house shall be erected, a colored man, free or slave, shall come in and seat himself as any other man . will that, with you, be all right?” It was agreed to name the church the “Free Church of Christ” where all men would be invited. But some congregants warned that, while they allowed Blacks to sit at their dinner tables, “in a place of public worship . you cannot do this. If you attempt it one brick will not be left on another” (Fee, 1891, p. 55). Fee was a rarity among nineteenth century preachers in the border state of Kentucky. But despite great odds, his ministry has survived in the form of Berea College. Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, founded in 1855 as a one-room schoolhouse, was the first college in the southern United States to be coeducationally and racially integrated. In close conjunction with the AMA, Oberlin College provided an existing northern model for a school built on the principles of Christian perfectionism, interracial coeducation, free speech and manual labor. Otis Waters, George Candee, and William E. Lincoln, three of Berea’s earliest teachers, were Oberlin graduates as was J. A. R. Rogers. But Oberlin, near Cleveland, Ohio, existed in relative peace compared to Berea’s southern experience (Wilson, 2006). By 1866, Berea had 96 Black and 91 White students but it would not award it first college degree until 1873. Berea College went about its business in relative harmony for most of its existence. Such tolerance was unlikely in a small, largely pro-slavery, rural community in the mid-nineteenth century. Berea stood as a unique pocket of desegregation for a half century until the guilty © The Journal of Negro Education, 2013, Vol. 82, No.1 35 populism of Jim Crow derailed it in 1904. It would be the mid-twentieth century before the rest of the country caught up. THE BIRTH OF BEREA The anti-slavery message of Reverend John G. Fee had reached the ears of Cassius M. Clay of Madison County. Clay, cousin (once removed) to Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, was a controversial emancipationist and fiery orator whose speeches drew praise and violent opposition in equal measure. Clay fought many duels and narrowly escaped death at the hands of pro-slavery forces in 1843 and again in 1849. He served as state representative in the 1835 and 1837 terms before publishing an anti-slavery newspaper titled, The True American, finding fame in the Mexican-American War, and later being named Ambassador to Russia by President Abraham Lincoln (Ellison, 2005; McQueen, 2001; Richardson, 1976). Early in the spring of 1853, Clay requested that Fee forward to him a number of his anti- slavery manuals that Clay distributed throughout Madison County. He requested that Fee travel to Madison County to preach to a small congregation there. Fee was reluctant to leave his church on the border of the state “just at the time when they are springing up into a measure of prosperity and efficiency” (Fee, 1891, p. 89). Fee, the son of a middling slave-holder father who disinherited him upon his conversion to abolitionism, lacked a prominent family background (Cheseborough, 1996, p. 44). He considered it a privation to “sell out our small effects, take our little ones and go 140 miles into the interior and into a place comparatively a wilderness, without schools, railroads, or even turnpikes” (Fee, 1891, p. 89). But Clay provided land and offered Fee a farm on which to live if he would become pastor to the little flock. Fee reasoned that his mission was to “preach the gospel of love in Kentucky,” and he accepted (Fee, 1891, p. 89). As his home was nearing completion, Fee began to plan for a school-house up on the ridge which came to be known as the “old District School-house.” He named the new village Berea, after the first century Macedonian city visited by biblical figures such as Paul, Silas, and Timothy on their second missionary journey. It was said that Bereans “received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether these things were so; therefore they believed” (Acts 17, 10-12 KJV). Similarly to Clay, Fee’s preaching was frequently met by threats and sometimes mobs of men who drove him away against his will. But unlike Clay, Fee responded without violence, which may well have saved his life. When assaulted in Bracken County, Fee had filed complaints with the county magistrate, which provided some security. He found no such comfort in Madison County. Of the two, it was Fee whose rhetoric was the more inflammatory; an issue Clay brought to his attention. Following one particular speech on July 8, 1855, Clay chastised Fee’s use of the phrase “sum of villainies” as being unnecessarily inflammatory saying, “We should not needlessly offend anyone: as it is neither our duty, nor our interest . [T]hose who we influence . may be rather chilled than warmed by our overheat” (Carlee, 1979, p. 115)! Fee’s relationship with Clay would soon become contentious and highlighted the difference between the more radical abolitionists and the more moderate emancipationists. In 1846, Clay said that immediate emancipation would be best for all but because of the selfishness, irreligion, and unyielding habits of White Kentuckians; he accepted gradual abolition as a political goal (Harrold, 1995). As Clay explained in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, “You fight outside the Union; I within it. So long as we agree in purpose we will agree to disagree in the means” (Ruchames, 1975, pp. 279-280). But Fee’s uncompromising message of abolition was motivated by faith. When he declared, in 1856, that pro-slavery laws must not be obeyed, he precipitated a breach with Clay. When Fee later organized the tiny Radical Abolitionist Party in Kentucky, Clay withdrew his physical protection. Fee lamented that there was no better known man in the history of Berea and that Clay’s “known opposition to us was a power more potent and depressing than all the mobs in the State” (Fee, 1891, p. 129). 36 © The Journal of Negro Education, 2013, Vol. 82, No. 1 But Fee insisted on a free church and a school built on the Golden Rule. He saw Clay’s objection to the co-education of the races—the distinguishing feature of the school and church at Berea—as politically expedient. Clay was invited, but declined, to become a Trustee of the school. In Fee’s view, Clay thought the Golden Rule was a good rule in general but “it was not expedient to practice upon it in the co-education of the races” (Fee, 1891, p. 138). The by-laws prohibited any “sectarian test” for its professors but required that the teacher “be competent to fill the office, and have a Christian experience with a righteous practice” (Fee, 1891, p. 141). Clay doubted whether such a school could be a “numerical or a financial success” (Fee, 1891, p. 131). The first term of instruction came in 1858. During the school’s closing ceremonies, a former member of the Kentucky General Assembly took the stage without invitation and declared, I expected to see a little handful in the bresh, (brush) but when I saw this large assembly, orderly, and listening with marked attention and interest, and when I saw the marked progress of these pupils, and the manifest sympathy between teachers and pupils, my heart was touched.

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