Tuskegees of the North: African American orphanages in New York, 1890--1940

Between 1890 to 1930, two orphanages for African American children in New York, the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School and the Colored Orphan Asylum, embraced industrial education for their charges. At the nadir of black social status since slavery, and at the apex of the child-saving movement, the supple ideology of industrial education proved a useful instrument to all three of the groups most intimately involved in the control of these institutions: liberal, interracialist whites; hard-line white-supremacists; and middle-class blacks. However, with a curriculum obsolete even as it was taught, industrial education for black children meant the silent sanction of black disempowerment and subordination. By examining traditional written records as well as visual images of the schools, this work explores the tensions and struggles surrounding this ideology.; Racial tensions among whites that arose over the purpose and management of these institutions shed new light on the notion of race relations during this period. While historians have documented interracial struggles and struggles within the black community, differences among Northern whites have been largely ignored. Before World War One, liberal white Northerners stood outside white social norms and came under attack for empowering blacks. Later, this dynamic reversed and white-supremacist orphanage managers were chastised for their racist institutional practices.; The new divisions over black citizenship and equality that emerged among whites in the early twentieth century would widen over time. This story begins with the first waves of blacks' Great Migration from the South and the crystallizing of hard-edged racial segregation in the North. It ends, however, with the New-Deal-era embrace of civic nationalism and a renewed dedication to the ideals of democratic opportunity. As the contradictions and compromises of this history show, it was not a direct path, nor a predetermined one. But in the white rejection of industrial education we can see an embryonic embrace of a new civil-rights ideology that would soon envelop the postwar American North.