'We gave our hearts and lives to it': African-American women reformers, industrial education, and the monuments of nation-building in the post-Reconstruction South, 1877--1938 (Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, South Carolina, Jennie Dean, Virginia)

This dissertation is an architectural, social, and intellectual history of Black industrial schools in the American South. It is a case study of two African American women's efforts to establish industrial and normal schools for their race in the late nineteenth century. These women reformers not only promoted a program of ‘race uplift’ through industrial education, but also engaged with many of the pioneering African American architects and builders of the period to design model schools and communities for the race as a form of nascent nation-building. In this study, I focus on the work of Elizabeth Evelyn Wright (1872–1906), founder of the Voorhees Industrial School (1894) in Denmark, South Carolina, and Jennie Dean (1848–1913), founder of the Manassas Industrial School (1892), in Manassas, Virginia. Employing the theoretical models of landscape and architectural anthropology, I examine the ways in which African American women's social and political ideology of ‘race uplift’ were inscribed onto the built environment through the design and construction of these model schools. I uncover an enduring socio-spatial legacy of women's activism with the founding of these institutions. I contend that these educational landscapes are therefore symbolic representations and/or artifacts of the cause for Black liberation and communal self-empowerment as whites sought to rewrite southern history by advocating “The Lost Cause.” In response to the many fictive narratives of that “glorious and noble” Southern past, Blacks saw “monument building” as their attempt to redefine a new civic discourse and provide meaning to democracy through their own efforts at all-Black institution making. These “Black, memory sites of learning” can be seen as more than paeans to uplift ideology, but as a series of commemorations of theories—spatial, gendered, and racialized—of nationalism. I argue that an early form of gendered Black nationalism took shape and manifested itself physically in these schools as a series of complex strategies and political ideologies centered on race-based institution building and historical recovery efforts.