These Separate Schools: Black Politics and Education in Washington, D.C., 1900-1930 By Rachel Deborah Bernard A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Waldo Martin, Chair Professor Mark Brilliant Professor Malcolm Feeley Spring 2012 Abstract These Separate Schools: Black Politics and Education in Washington, D.C., 1900-1930 by Rachel Deborah Bernard Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Waldo Martin, Chair “These Separate Schools: Black Politics and Education in Washington, D.C., 1900-1930,” chronicles the efforts of black Washingtonians to achieve equitable public funding and administrative autonomy in their public schools and at Howard University. This project argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, black Washingtonians came to understand their two-pronged goals of administrative autonomy and equitable allocation of resources in both their public schools and at Howard in terms of civil rights. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans in Washington defended their educational institutions as venues for individually demonstrating their own good citizenship and respectability, in other words as means to social and economic uplift. By the 1910s and 1920s, however, they spoke about equal educational opportunity as a civil right, guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution. Also, while these struggles for educational equality began in the public schools, they were soon taken up by leaders at Howard University and its law school. In addition to educational equality, administrative autonomy was another key part of black Washingtonians’ rights agenda. Black Washingtonians were able to carve out a nearly autonomous space first in the segregated public schools in the 1900s and 1910s and then at Howard University in the 1920s, and they considered this degree of independence critical to improving and maintaining the quality of their schools. Although they fully acknowledged and abhorred the fact that racial segregation was intended to subjugate their race, by persistently pressing for autonomy, black Washingtonians imbued the institution of racial separation in Washington’s black schools and black university with new meaning. Rather than solely symbolizing oppression, through their efforts racial separation became a marker of leadership and power. Taken together, the battle for equalizing primary, secondary, and higher education was a critical component of the black civil rights agenda in this period, even within the context of racial segregation. “These Separate Schools” challenges the notion that the battle for educational equality began in the 1930s and 1940s in the courtroom and demonstrates instead that it began in the early twentieth century with the activism of ordinary black citizens in Washington, D.C., which in this period was governed by Congress. Contrary to typical portrayals of African-American political participation during the Jim Crow Era, this project shows that black Washingtonians were deeply involved in early twentieth-century political life on multiple levels. Locally, they were 1 instrumental in the District’s unique educational politics; nationally, they shaped federal government race policy and Congressional legislation; and, ideologically, they were leaders in a national conversation about civil rights, black advancement, and the role of education in American democracy. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 12 “90,000 Strong”: Black Washington at the Turn of the Twentieth Century CHAPTER TWO 39 “We Want Our Own”: Battles over Washington’s Black Public Schools at the Turn of the Twentieth Century CHAPTER THREE 72 “When Truth Gets a Hearing”: Democracy and the Black Public Schools in the 1910s CHAPTER FOUR 102 “Education for Freedom”: Black Leadership and the Federal Appropriation at Howard University, 1925-1928 CHAPTER FIVE 132 Serving the Race: The Professionalization of Legal Education at Howard University, 1920-1931 CONCLUSION 154 “A Paradise of Paradoxes”: The Politics of Segregated Education in Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY 157 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have come to be without the help of my colleagues, friends, librarians, and advisors. I’d like to thank the staff of all of the libraries and research collections my research has taken me to over the past several years. At the Library of Congress, the staff in the Main Reading Room, Law Library, and Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room always retrieved and delivered materials with alacrity and the librarians in the Manuscript Reading Room were helpful pointing me toward useful collections in their holdings. The Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives was a hidden gem with a remarkable collection of documents, manuscripts, and ephemera related to the D.C. public schools. I thank Kimberly Springle for her trust in granting me open access to the collections and Hayden Wetzel for his guidance and truly unmatched dedication as the Charles Sumner School’s volunteer archivist. Over the course of my research I discovered a small, but vibrant community interested in the local history of Washington, D.C., many of whom are connected to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Early on in my research, librarians at HSW’s Kiplinger Research Library guided me through some of their material, as well as their archive of their journal The Records of the Columbia Historical Society. They also gave me the opportunity to present a version of Chapter Two at the D.C. Historical Studies Conference in 2010, where I made several valuable connections with other scholars and community members. Another hub for local history in Washington is in the Washingtoniana division at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and I thank the group of librarians there for help finding books, manuscripts, and microfilm of D.C. newspapers. The collections that I spent by far the most time in were those in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. I’d like to thank Teddy Abebe, the several staff members in the MSRC reading room, and Dr. Clifford Muse, Jr., for giving me tremendous help navigating the MSRC’s Howard University archives. I am also grateful to Dr. Muse for sharing with me an excerpt from a forthcoming article about Mordecai Johnson. In the Manuscript Division of the MSRC, I received special guidance over the years from Dr. Ida Jones and Joellen ElBashir and I would also like to thank Richard Jenkins for all of his photocopying. The MSRC’s collection is truly unparalleled and this dissertation would not exist without it. At Berkeley, I have had tremendous support from my colleagues and advisors. My colleagues in the dissertation writers group that my advisor Waldo Martin convened have read closely and commented insightfully on several chapters and for that I thank them: A.B. Wilkinson, Alex Garcia, Joe Duong, Joe Orbock, and Jeff Bradley. I want to give special thanks to Kerima Lewis and Felicia Viator who, in addition to offering thoughtful feedback, also provided moral support through the dissertation process. In addition to the members of my dissertation committee, I would also like to express my gratitude to two professors in particular for making me a better historian and a better writer before I reached the dissertation phase: Robin Einhorn and David Henkin. The members of my dissertation committee have truly been all that I could have hoped for. Malcolm Feeley has been incredibly amenable to my hands-off approach and he provided some crucial guidance very early on in the project. Mark Brilliant has been an incisive reader and has really helped me hone my argument and think about the broader implications of this project. Waldo Martin, the chair of my dissertation committee, is responsible for getting this dissertation ii off the ground and seeing it through to completion. He went far beyond what is expected of an advisor by running a dissertation writers group and he never stopped encouraging me, supporting me, responding to every concern I have had along the way, and offering thoughtful advice. Most of all, I’d like to thank Waldo for his kindness and for his way with putting things in perspective. Even though they might not realize it, my friends helped me complete this dissertation in myriad indirect ways. Thanks to these historian and non-historian friends for chatting in the history department hallways, offering pats on the back when I made progress, and listening to me complain when I hit an impasse: Daniel Immerwahr, Ariel Ron, Mackenzie Moore, Bea Gurwitz, Anna Armentrout, Chris Shaw, Candace Chen, Sarah Selvidge, Courtney Smith, and, especially, Kate Marshall. Because my dissertation research was in D.C., which is where I grew up, I ended up spending several months over the course of researching and writing my dissertation as a proverbial “boomerang” child. I thank my parents for welcoming me back home and I am grateful for the time we got to spend back in the same city, even when I wasn’t living with them. Their support, in this way and many others, was invaluable. Finally, I thank Seth. Despite the fact that I have not allowed him to read a single word of my dissertation, he helped me work through ideas, asked me questions that made me think about my project in different ways, came to D.C. with me for eight months during a long research stint, and provided endless comfort, encouragement, and love. Most of all, I want to thank him for his unwavering confidence in me, without which I might not have had the guts or the stamina to see this project through to the end. iii INTRODUCTION In a 1935 essay in the Journal of Negro Education, W.E.B. Du Bois posed the question, “Does the Negro need separate schools?” His answer was an emphatic “God knows he does.”1 Du Bois’s attitude toward racially segregated schools was pragmatic: as long as whites believed in the inferiority of black people, black children and young adults were better off in separate schools and universities.