Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

238 // EARL LEWIS
Black. Nothing suggests that Isaac set out to aid the multitudes of enslaved
Blacks; few who came of age in antebellum America would have thought such
actions reasonable. This changed as the country made the awkward transition
from slavery to emancipation to segregation. The venture into the politics of philanthropy
made it possible.
The Politics of Philanthropy
Freedpeople had many aspirations after the Civil War, including the right to exercise
the franchise, to sell their labor, and to reconnect with loved ones. However,
few desires struck contemporaries as powerfully and dramatically as the quest for
an education. Across the South, African Americans overwhelmed missionaries
sent South by the American Missionary Association (AMA) and other agencies.
Long denied proper training, after difficult starts, Blacks made progress.
Charlotte Forten, member of one of Philadelphia's leading families of color and
a teacher-missionary, gushed in 1862 from the liberated Sea Islands of South
Carolina, "It is a great happiness to teach them. I wish some of those persons at
the North who say the race is.. .inferior, could see...these children, so long
oppressed and deprived of every privilege, learn and understand." Freedpeople
equated education with equality and power. They soon inundated Freedmen's
Bureau institutions, exchanged their immediate need for child labor for the longterm
benefit of educated youngsters, and even tolerated the twin offerings of the
gospel and the primer. In 1870 alone, more than 247,000 Black students enrolled
in Bureau schools. 25
In the anxious years of reconstruction, Blacks and non-Jewish whites sowed a
relationship that had profound implications for Blacks and Jews a generation
later. Given the starting point, primary and secondary school education remained
a concern for much of the nineteenth century. But beginning in the 1860s, some
acknowledged the importance of training a generation of college educated freedpeople.
Building on ties birthed in abolitionism, white caretakers, dependent on
largesse, built the first phase of Black colleges in the late 1860s. Bearing the
names of white benefactors—Howard, Fisk, or Biddle—or attesting to their locations—Hampton
or Atlanta—these new schools marked the birth of philanthropic
interest in Black education. 26
Some scholars have questioned the motives of those whites who oversaw Black
institutions and the philanthropists who gave of their wealth, time, and counsel.
Without question, men such as Samuel Armstrong, who founded and directed
highly influential Hampton Institute in its formative years, fancied Blacks other
than their equals. They viewed themselves as missionaries sent by God to do good
among the less fortunate—yes, even the inferior. It did not matter that they knew,
or knew of, Blacks of accomplishment. Whites as much as Blacks fell under the
sway of a racial vision of America. Armstrong, for instance, counseled Blacks to
accept their lot by training for their place as loyal, cheap, southern labor. 27