Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
the end of the Civil War to help rehabilitate former slaves and prepare them for the new societal and civic roles they were on the cusp of assuming. An examination of the Hampton Folklore Society (HFS) will give us a glimpse into the uses to which the environmentalists were putting their work, and it will also anticipate some of the goals and complications faced by Black ethnologists, who, in the 1920s, formed the next significant body of African American individuals loosely organized around their mutual interest in collecting and representing African American folk culture.
The Hampton Idea of Folklore Collection
The Hampton Institute, founded in 1868 in Virginia by the American Missionary Society, was designed to educate the state’s population of newly emancipated slaves. Its founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, anticipated that Hampton students would fan across the South to teach the members of their communities still mired in the legacy of slavery, manual skills, and rudimentary letters in order to render them useful members of Southern society. The “Hampton Idea,” first articulated by Armstrong and later popularized by Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington, who went on to found Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and become a national spokesman for the race, was that an industrial education would elevate the station of Blacks by giving them the manual skills and the moral character that would make them fit for civil society. Armstrong faulted slavery and its negative effects rather than any inherent inferiority in African Americans for the moral, intellectual, and political inadequacies he identified in their communities. Understanding the word “industry” to mean broadly “diligence in the pursuit of a goal” and more narrowly to mean “the application of manual skills in the production of some agricultural or mechanical object,” he considered the school’s emphasis on an industrial education in preference of schooling in a classical education the key to saving Black people from the primitive conditions in which slavery and impoverishment kept them mired.5
It was under this premise that Alice Bacon, a Hampton teacher, founded the Hampton Folklore Society (HFS) in 1893. The society, whose members were composed of students, alumni, and some teachers, worked until they disbanded six years later to collect data gathered from the communities in which they lived and worked.6 Students brought with them to the Hampton campus knowledge of folklore from their Southern homes. Non-resident members of the Society (many, but not all, of them Institute graduates), known as “correspondents,” often worked as teachers in other parts of the South (for example, South Carolina, Florida and Alabama), and probably obtained folklore from their own students (Waters 8). The organizational efforts of the Hampton Folklore Society were new and untested, for folklore groups were just beginning to be organized in the 1890s. The group’s emphasis on scholarly presentation and scientific investigation departed from prior methods because up to that point individuals interested in African American folklore, like Joel Chandler Harris, moved between “disciplined presentation of data and literary adornment of it” (Waters 37). HFS members understood folklore to be the repository of cultural memory and communal values, and yet they worked within an institution that saw little value in African American culture if it deviated from hegemonic norms that were associated with progress.7 The question arises, then, what did the HFS members have in mind when they went out to collect folklore?
Hampton’s commitment to putting its students on the road to economic and social progress compelled them to choose from several options vis-à-vis their relation to folk culture and communities. They could express an uncritical belief in folklore (a perspective which was discouraged by their instructors and benefactors); they could disavow Black folk traditions as backward and see themselves bringing progress and civilization to their people; or they could choose, as Donald Waters maintains members of the Hampton society did, to commit themselves to protecting Black folklore from contempt and ridicule by submitting it to careful and respectful study and presentation (Waters 46–47).
The second choice—the idea of racial uplift through cultural assimilation—proved equally compelling according to Lee Baker, who stresses that the founders and members of the Hampton Folklore society saw their attempts to record the cultural practices of rural Blacks as a contribution to the larger institution’s mission. They could show that industrial education accomplished its goal of “fostering the so-called Christian civilization of its graduates,” he argues, by using folklore to underscore how much of these people’s African traditions remained entrenched and in need of uprooting.8 Certainly Bacon aspired to have HFS members bridge and show the divide between their own literate, upwardly mobile existences and the illiterate and impoverished lives of most Black folk. But the Hampton community’s shared goal of closing that gap was deeply invested in removing any remaining traces of African heritage and African American slave culture.9
Armstrong and Bacon’s goals were virtually indistinguishable, with the exception of Bacon adding an interest in historical preservation to Armstrong’s “civilizing mission” (Baker, “Research” 55). Bacon’s interest in conservation and her belief in modernity’s inevitable advancement is evident in an 1893 letter she circulated to Hampton graduates and interested parties:
The American Negroes are rising so rapidly from the condition of ignorance and poverty in which slavery left them, to a position among the cultivated and civilized people of the earth, that the time seems not far distant when they shall have cast off their past entirely, and stand an anomaly among civilized races, as a people having no distinct tradition, beliefs or ideas from which a history of their growth may be traced. If within the next few years care is not taken to collect and preserve all traditions and customs peculiar to the Negroes, there will be little to reward the search of the future historian who would trace the history of the African continent through the years of slavery to the position which they will hold a few generations hence.10
Bacon imagined progress for the Negro to be synonymous not only with economic upward mobility but also with assimilation to Euro-American cultural norms. Many adherents to the Hampton philosophy associated backwardness and primitivity with any traits that deviated from a White social norm, as well as with anything identified or identifiable as African in origins. Blackness and impurity are linked in the minds of Booker T. Washington’s readers when he provocatively declared that his most pressing aspiration as a teacher was to introduce Tuskegee students to the uses of a toothbrush because he and his teachers noted “the effect that the use of the toothbrush has had in bringing about a higher degree of civilization among the students.”11 Washington’s emphasis on hygiene throughout his autobiography indicates his shared understanding with Bacon and Armstrong that the goal of an industrial education should be the figurative “whitening” of the school’s Black students, both morally and socially.
Nonetheless, Bacon’s letter also makes it clear that she considers it regrettable if progress were achieved at the expense of Negro cultural heritage. Hampton officials’ belief in African Americans’ cultural assimilability was progressive for its time, but Bacon understood that it might not be completely positive to the future development of the race if the consequence of assimilation was the loss of identity. Bacon’s hesitation at the idea of fully erasing Negro cultural heritage even as Black communities modernized becomes more palpable when we consider the statements of HFS’s Black membership. Their reflections on their relation to the uplift work in which they engaged points to issues that are both complex and fascinating.
Their letters and essays emphasize in part the connection between educators and their not so distant past, between teachers and their illiterate, less acculturated pupils. HFS members, like other students, faculty, and graduates of the school were committed to a project of racial uplift that strove to address economic and racial inequality. Rather than framing their descriptions of their “less civilized” peers in terms of class, they did so in terms of culture (Baker, “Research” 51).12 And as a consequence, their shared definitions of social mobility exerted a pressure on cultural formations, resulting in the stigmatization of traits typically associated with African or African American communities. Baker writes that in this earlier period:
Uncivilized Blacks were the ones who believed in conjure doctors, told the animal stories, sang the work songs, and gyrated their bodies in the ring shouts and jook joints. They were also the field hands, manual laborers, domestics, and washer women who never had the opportunity to attend one of the normal schools in which