Between the 1910s and 1950s, progressive education had a major impact on the educational landscape of both White and Black schools in the United States. Yet, whereas the literature on progressive education in White schools is enormous,Footnote 1 the literature on progressive education in Black schools is relatively smaller and more recent.Footnote 2 Previous historians have explored the use of progressive methods by Black teachers in Harlem and South Carolina,Footnote 3 the role of pedagogically progressive ideas held by Black intellectuals,Footnote 4 the development of Black-authored textbooks and curriculum materials,Footnote 5 the use of pageants and oration in Black schools,Footnote 6 and the extensively documented Secondary School Study of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes during the 1940s.Footnote 7 Although historians of Black teachers have recognized the role of progressive pedagogy during this period, they have overlooked some major reform initiatives connected to progressive education, such as Black platoon schools, the activity method, and student-centered school governance, and how these initiatives grew out of the broader effort by Black progressive educators to fuse academic and practical knowledge.Footnote 8 With this article, we seek to expand our understanding of pedagogically progressive experiments by Black classroom teachers during the interwar years by tracing how Black teachers contributed to the theory and practice of progressive education in ways that drew upon the theory and practice of White progressives but, in the pursuit of racial advancement, also diverged from it. We argue that Black educators introduced pedagogically progressive teaching methods to engage their students with a relevant curriculum that fused academic and practical knowledge to protect the academic curriculum during a time in which there was political, social, and financial pressure by White leaders to focus the Black curriculum solely on manual training. This fused approach to curriculum and instruction later expanded to include the development of democratic skills and dispositions.
By drawing upon archival and published accounts of classroom practice in Black schools, we demonstrate how educational prescriptions in the 1920s and 1930s by nationally known Black scholars, such as Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois, reflected and endorsed pedagogical innovations that were taking place at the local level. We focus on three pedagogically progressive classroom reforms that emerged in roughly chronological order: the platoon school, the activity method, and the development of democratic dispositions aimed at active citizenship. We explain how these reforms steered the pedagogically progressive rhetoric away from manual training preferred by White leaders toward a purposeful pedagogy that empowered Black students.
How did Black educators define progressive education at the time? William A. Robinson, principal of the Atlanta University Laboratory School, defined progressive education as “learning experiences based on participation in activities,” and the development of students’ “free and unrepressed personalities and the ability and desire to be frankly critical of their own behavior and of the behavior of others.”Footnote 9 High school teacher C. M. Evans defined it as a belief that “learning is a growing process and is not confined to the brain but is a coordinated process affecting and being affected by the whole of the person’s being.”Footnote 10 Ambrose Caliver, Bureau of Education Specialist in the Education of Negroes, defined it as the belief that “subjects of instruction should not be taught in isolation from life … but they should be taught with definite reference to their social relation and use.”Footnote 11 Although definitions of progressive pedagogy varied, Black educators consistently emphasized student expression, active learning, and making academic subject matter socially relevant to their students, all in the service of developing democratic dispositions and critical thinking. By linking Black progressive pedagogy with the methods, dispositions, and rhetoric of a dynamic and critical democracy, these educators expanded the movement beyond merely “learning by doing”—a phrase that had been used by Hampton Institute teacher Thomas Jesse Jones, the White so-called expert in Black education, to justify manual training for Black students before World War I—toward the development of students’ critical thinking, cooperation, and individual expression. The active democratic practices suggested by Black pedagogical progressives extended beyond the humble and passive habits of “economy, thrift, and the dignity of labor” emphasized by Jones and Booker T. Washington at the Hampton and Tuskegee industrial schools.Footnote 12
Manual training under the Hampton-Tuskegee model was not the same as vocational training. According to Frank G. Rogers, the White director of training at the Hampton Institute, manual training was more general than vocational training, because instead of focusing on a single craft or occupational skill, manual training focused on building stamina, concentration, hand-eye coordination, and moral discipline, which allegedly led “to mental growth” of the student that could then be transferred to “new activities.” Manual training, Rogers explained, was based on the idea that “whatever trains the hands and eyes acts upon the mind as well, developing healthier activities and stimulating the whole mental machinery to reaction and better control of the faculties.”Footnote 13 Although educators characterized both the manual training approach of the Hampton-Tuskegee model and pedagogical progressivism as “learning by doing,” Black progressive educators emphasized individual expression, the fusion of academic and practical knowledge, and the development of democratic dispositions, whereas White advocates of manual training focused solely on developing students’ self-control and physical stamina. We argue that Black progressive education was largely driven by this deliberate transition away from manual training toward the fusion of academic and practical knowledge in the name of developing democratic dispositions, such as critical thinking and inquiry methods, to act upon and transform the world.
“Learning by Doing” and the Fusion of Academic and Practical Knowledge
One of the first Black pedagogical progressives to fuse practical and academic content was William R. Valentine. After his graduation from Harvard University in 1904, Valentine served as principal of a segregated Black High School, P. S. No. 26 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Valentine “spent a summer in Columbia University,” where he likely met progressive educational philosopher John Dewey, because John and his daughter Evelyn featured Valentine’s pedagogy in their classic account of progressive educational experiments, Schools of To-morrow, published in 1915.Footnote 14 In the book, the Deweys related how Valentine incorporated traditional academic content in relation to its practical and real-world function. For example, “The domestic science classes include lessons in buying, the comparative costs and values of food, something of food chemistry and values.” Thus, Valentine’s teachers introduced mathematical concepts in the context of purchasing food, and chemistry in the context of cooking. In July 1915, The Crisis, the flagship journal of the NAACP, reported how “Dr. John Dewey of Columbia University in his new book ‘Schools of Today’ [sic], devotes considerable space to a description of [Valentine’s] work,” and it noted how Valentine had also been featured in Popular Education and the Indianapolis Star.Footnote 15
Beyond documenting the accomplishments of Valentine, the Deweys’ Schools of To-morrow further popularized the phrase “learning by doing”—which would forever be affiliated with pedagogical progressivism and the coterminous nature of academic and practical content. “Learning by doing” meant learning through problem-solving and collective participation as opposed to learning passively through reading or listening, or recitation. “Learning by doing is a better way to learn than by listening,” the Deweys explained, “Aside from the psychological reasons for teaching by this method, it is the logical consequence of the realization of the importance of physical welfare of the child.”Footnote 16 The phrase was further popularized by White philosopher and journalist Randolph Bourne, who titled a chapter in his 1916 book on the Dewey-inspired platoon schools of Gary, Indiana, “The Curriculum: Learning by Doing.”Footnote 17 According to both Bourne and the Deweys, a purposeful pedagogy in which students learned by doing not only aligned with the latest research, but it was also more engaging, democratic, and humane than traditional, teacher-centered instruction. However, “learning by doing” was also a phrase used to depict the anti-academic manual training program of the Hampton-Tuskegee model for Black students in the South. In 1915, the White principal of Hampton Institute, H. B. Frissell, explained: “To us at Hampton the doing of the things is the important thing… . We have got to learn by doing… . The academic training is really secondary to the actual doing of things.”Footnote 18 This reveals the dual nature of the phrase. For Dewey, Bourne, and Valentine, “learning by doing” was a way to make academic content relevant by connecting it to the real world. For Frissell, “learning by doing” was a way to pit academic knowledge against manual training, with emphasis on the latter.
The next year, in the two-volume report Negro Education, the US Bureau of Education further endorsed a “learning by doing” approach for Black students. Lead author Thomas Jesse Jones noted how the Black teachers they observed in their survey tended to teach in a traditional manner by emphasizing “subject matter of their courses to the neglect of methods of presentation.” Employing the progressive rhetoric of the time, Jones suggested that Black teachers gain a “vital appreciation of the pupil and his community,” present “great truths in terms of personal experience,” and structure the classroom “as a community instead of a lecture hall.” By making explicit connections between the subject matter and “actual conditions of real life … together [the students] will ‘learn to do by doing.’” Jones cited the phrase again in reference to the training of teachers, insisting that “‘learning by doing’ is as vital in the training of teachers as in the preparation of any other group of workers.”Footnote 19 Despite these references to progressive pedagogy, Jones’s report ultimately endorsed a Hampton-Tuskegee-style industrial education for most Black students. In response, sociologist and Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois denounced Negro Education in the journal and later dubbed Jones the “evil genius of the Negro race. In his review, Du Bois sarcastically characterized Jones’s position as: “Let us have, therefore, not colleges but schools … to make [Black] men learn by doing.”Footnote 20
Black educator Anna Julia Cooper also employed the phrase “learn by doing” in an undated essay from the 1920s that emphasized the fusion of academic and practical knowledge. Cooper, former principal and teacher at the M Street School in Washington, DC, explained how practical and academic content ought not to be treated hierarchically or antagonistically. Rather they should be fused into what she called “enlightened industrialism.” As Cooper explained: “We learn by doing when we dissect a crayfish or build a Latin sentence in the secondary school, when we perform a chemical reaction in the laboratory or express a thought in French, German, or Spanish, as when we read, write, or draw in the primary grades.” To distinguish her position from Washington’s and Jones’s industrial educational approach, Cooper elaborated, “Enlightened industrialism does not mean that the body who plows cotton must study nothing but cotton and that he who would drive a mule successfully should have contact only with mules.” Cooper sought to recast practical and academic education for Black students as coterminous because they were both different forms of learning by doing.Footnote 21 As long as every student had a firm foundation in a “thorough course of general education” that avoided the “stunting and warping of all normal child-development by premature specialization,” then Cooper saw value in both practical and academic education for older students. This approach was not only more humane, but, according to Cooper, was “the natural order of any educational program based upon scientific principles of human development.”Footnote 22 Thus, Cooper adopted the pedagogically progressive language of “learning by doing” to cast purposeful pedagogy as meaningful, engaging, and, most importantly, liberating for Black minds and bodies. To this end, she concluded, “No amount of indignity can really degrade a soul truly in possession of itself through scientific development of its faculties.”Footnote 23
With the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 and the Hampton-Tuskegee model of manual and industrial training on the wane, W.E.B. Du Bois also updated his pedagogical beliefs in the 1920s to embrace a more nuanced approach to the relationship between practical and academic learning. Early in his career, Du Bois rose to fame upon his critique of Washington’s Hampton-Tuskegee model. However, he soon softened his position, recognizing value in both academic and practical work, and began emphasizing how the two reinforced one another. In 1915, Du Bois praised the work of Valentine and visited him at Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in New Jersey, where Valentine had recently taken a position. Du Bois was so impressed with Valentine’s work at Bordentown, he tried (unsuccessfully) to get The Nation to write a feature article on the school.Footnote 24 Inspired by Valentine, Du Bois explained how practical and academic knowledge were equally important. He criticized an education that provided only “technical knowledge, without culture or general knowledge,” and likewise dismissed an education “of books and brains with no contact with first-hand knowledge of real everyday life and ordinary human beings.”Footnote 25
The pivot by White and Black educators from passive to active methods during the 1920s not only increased student engagement and recognized student individuality but also reflected the new progressive approach to knowledge. Cooper and Du Bois recognized that the divide between practical and academic knowledge was artificial; every utilitarian act had an academic element, and every academic fact could be applied to the real world. If teachers made this connection explicit to students, then students would appreciate these connections and thus be equipped to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances of the industrializing economy. In their pursuit of purposeful pedagogy that combined practical and academic knowledge in the 1920s, Black pedagogical progressives applied the progressive language of “learning by doing” to pedagogical innovations that were currently being implemented in segregated Black schools. However, Black educators were skeptical of White educators’ praise for industrial education, and they saw through the attempts by Jones and other White educators to employ the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism toward conservative ends. As Du Bois pithily explained in his critique of Negro Education, Jones “stresses the adaptation of education to the needs of the ‘community,’ evidently meaning the white community.”Footnote 26 Du Bois spoke directly to the need to foster and sustain a pedagogical approach that valued Black contributions and knowledge.
Black Platoon Schools
By the 1920s, some urban Black educators were beginning to experiment with pedagogically progressive methods that had their students fuse academic and practical knowledge through learning by doing. Several Black communities adopted the celebrated platoon (or Gary Plan) system, which had students spend part of the day engaged in practical activities and part of the day engaged in academic classrooms so that the entire school facility was in constant use and the number of enrolled students could be doubled.Footnote 27 As Black educator Ada Harrison related in 1931, “For several years there has been in the field of elementary education a demand for unification of learning, a correlation of projects and ideals such as is exemplified in our best high school.” The platoon school, Harrison related, “developed out of this demand.”Footnote 28
The Gibbs Grammar School in Little Rock, Arkansas, alternated between two “home rooms,” one “where the three Rs [reading, writing, arithmetic] are taught” and one “for special activities when children receive training in the social ethical, and physical phases of life.” One platoon focused on academics and the other focused on manual training—thus solving the Washington-Du Bois debate by addressing both curricular aspects in shifts.Footnote 29 In 1923, the Harriet Beecher Stowe School, a segregated Black elementary school in Cincinnati, Ohio, adopted the platoon system model by applying the latest progressive methods and ideas. To organize the curriculum “in accordance with individual and local needs,” the Stowe School’s “psychological examiner” administered intelligence tests to all the students and sorted them based on their scores. The students with IQs below 90 were placed in classes that focused on “handwork and other similar work suited to their ability,” while the rest of the student population was offered the platoon curriculum, with the day partly focused on industrial arts (woodwork, cabinetmaking, printing, house construction, cementing, and wiring) and partly on academics (history, science, and literature). A branch of the Cincinnati Public Library was housed in the Stowe Platoon School so the “children could learn library rules,” “acquire cards for book withdrawals,” and develop “reading habits, tastes and interests of an informational or pleasant nature.” The library held books on Negro history and biography, which students were encouraged to read for “knowledge and inspiration.” The Harriet Beecher Stowe School also offered a cultural space for the entire Black community and thus served as a resource for the local area.Footnote 30 Another Black school in Cincinnati, the Douglas School, also fused its educational offering with the surrounding community by offering a branch of the public library, night school for adults, clubs, concerts, lectures, movies, and a year-round gymnasium “for all in the community who may wish to attend.”Footnote 31
More Black platoon schools were established in Huntington, West Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. In New Orleans, the platoon organizational scheme was renamed the “work-study-play” system, a common description of the plan for White schools as well.Footnote 32 According to school administrators: “The essential feature of the platoon plan is a duplicate use of all the facilities of the school, making possible a balanced program in which the social and cultural aspects of the curriculum as well as the fundamental knowledges and skills may receive a full measure of emphasis.”Footnote 33 At the Thomy Lafon School in New Orleans, Black administrators employed the platoon organization to address “crowded building problems,” “overaged” students, and “recent comers from the rural districts where people have been handicapped by poor educational opportunities.” By making use of the large auditorium, pool, and gymnasium, they were able to “house several hundred more students than with the traditional organization.” Pearl Tasker, supervisor of elementary education in New Orleans, reported that the platoon arrangement “resulted in great improvement in the percentage of non-promotions and is helping to solve our problems of retardation.”Footnote 34 The Thomy Lafon School served as a community center in the evening and was open until 10:00 p.m.
It is unclear whether the Black platoon schools were initiated by Black or White administrators. Either way, there was genuine enthusiasm for the platoon school idea among Black educators, which they justified with pedagogically progressive rhetoric. For example, the Black administrators from Arkansas related how the platoon organization allowed “each individual to develop to the fullest extent his individual powers” and “doing those things which are beneficial to society as a whole”—thus appealing to “one who believes in a democracy.”Footnote 35 Yet, the platoon organization was also a response to an increasingly difficult set of circumstances for Black educators. Given the inadequate funding for schools, rising enrollments, and White insistence on manual and industrial training for most Black students, the platoon system allowed Black educators to maintain an academic curriculum in the face of rising demographic, financial, and social pressures. This reveals how some Black educators employed the rhetoric and practices of pedagogical progressivism to resist some of the dictates of White supremacy. Although the platoon organization did not necessarily fuse academic and utilitarian knowledge, it did present them both as equally important. The fusing of academic and real-world knowledge would be the focus of the activity method, which was adopted by several progressive Black schools in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Activity Method
Starting in the late 1920s, the segregated Black schools of Charlotte, North Carolina, began to integrate a pedagogically progressive activity program into its curriculum that extended far beyond what was being offered at the Black platoon schools. The curriculum emulated what was being offering to the White students, the authors insisted, except in its focus on Black history and art. All the students participated in “joint activities,” culminating in an exhibit of an African village, African life, African music, and “noted American Negroes.” In one student-initiated activity,
the children were naming signs of spring. One little boy named coming up and people planting gardens. This statement led to a discussion of a garden. The children became interested and decided that they wanted a garden of their own. The name was selected from the Tale of Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregor’s Garden. The story had been read to the children and they showed a fondness for it, hence the selection of the name.Footnote 36
The progressive Black teachers in the district offered creative activities for students during their summer vacation as well. These activities generated additional excitement for the activity idea the following year. As a result, the students in one class created a farm in the classroom, in which they “modeled a life size cow of paper pulp, and constructed a silo, bringing out the importance and cleanliness of the farm products in their relationship to the health of the pupils.” In another class, the students studied transportation and created model wagons, ships, stagecoaches, automobiles, and airplanes. “Suggestions as to the production, the buying and selling, and the manufacturing created a wonderful interest in both classes,” the Charlotte teachers related, “resulting in wide reading of outside material.” In another classroom, the children were studying the Rocky Mountains and farming irrigation. The teachers “wanted to do something to make it clearer to some of the children who didn’t understand,” so they “decided to make an Irrigated Farm Village” out of boxes, construction paper, electric wires, and cardboard.Footnote 37
In the write-up for these child-centered activities, the Charlotte teachers listed the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills learned for each activity. For the activity on gardens, the teachers listed reading, language, physical education, number work, art, spelling, nature study, writing, music, cooperation, neatness, school pride, and respect for labor. For an activity on a Pueblo village, the teachers noted how students learned reading, language, arithmetic, spelling, geography, neatness, and self-reliance. For the irrigated farm village activity, the students learned geography, English and spelling, arithmetic, creative expression, and character building. When surveyed about the effectiveness of the activity program, 60-70 percent of the teachers in the Charlotte school district agreed that the newer methods were better than traditional methods, and student test scores rose across all the elementary grades. The success of the pedagogically progressive methods was so great that the Charlotte curriculum and student work was put “on permanent exhibit in Germany”—an accomplishment that inspired the headline “International Interest in Charlotte” in the May 1930 Bulletin of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools.Footnote 38
Similarly, at the training elementary school of the Virginia State College, the schoolchildren noticed that a bridge was being constructed nearby. “The children made frequent comments on it from time to time,” W. E. Hamlin and H. D. Phillips reported in a 1931 issue of the Virginia State College Gazette. “During a period of several weeks (in the free period) some of them drew the derrick being used.” In addition to adding “African projects” and “Negro History Hour” to the curriculum, the progressive elementary school had recently pledged to “apply subject-matter to everyday life, which of course is largely Negro life,” so the teachers seized the opportunity to capitalize on the students’ interests. They designed a unit around the construction of the bridge that involved having the students visit the construction site three times. “Questions were raised, defined, and solved,” the teachers explained. “The final outcome was the construction of a [model] bridge, tracks, train, and cars, with the desirable learning products resulting.” Not only did the progressive teachers reorganize the curriculum around the “use of lifelike situations,” but they also connected the academic content to students’ spontaneous interests and inquiries.Footnote 39 Math and engineering were introduced, not as purely vocational knowledge, but as academic knowledge being applied to the real world in the context of a local public works project.
At P. S. 24 in Harlem, New York, Black educators in the 1930s emphasized the fusion of academic and practical knowledge for their Black students through their implementation of the pedagogically progressive “Unit Activity Program.” Gertrude Ayer, the first Black principal hired by the New York Public Schools, explained that she began to experiment with her pupils because she found “prevailing school procedures” were “too artificial for children.” Consequently, she and her faculty concentrated on building a curriculum and classroom procedures “created and planned by pupils and teachers together to approximate those in real life.”Footnote 40 In this approach, which emphasized student input and creativity, Ayer explained:
Conferences and discussions were chaired by the more gifted youngsters. Others came to like arithmetic through learning how things were bought, sold, or exchanged. Some learned through managing the class individual savings accounts. Those with a flair had plenty of opportunity to write anything from reports of committees to slogans, lyrics, and even some creative prose and poetry.Footnote 41
One of Ayer’s teachers, Kathleen Travers, took this approach further still by creating a “pupil run ‘School City’” modeled on the city government of New York and including the election of students to roles such as “school judge, head of patrol and sanitation squads, election inspectors and other posts.”Footnote 42 Such experiments in democratic living served multiple purposes for Black students who were denied full citizenship in the broader society.
After six years of implementing Ayer’s “progressive” approach to education in Harlem, the New York State Education Commission conducted a formal assessment of her work. Contrary to the expectations of many that progressive pedagogy would mean that “the three R’s [reading, writing, and arithmetic] would suffer,” evaluators found that “achievements were in most instances better than those achieved in the traditional control school.” Although Ayer’s methods were highly praised and recommended for citywide use, they were never widely adopted, a result that Ayer herself blamed on the lack of pedagogical skill and initiative on the part of many teachers.Footnote 43
Beyond these documented examples, a survey of over seven hundred Black principals conducted in 1929 revealed that progressive methods were making inroads in Black schools across the United States. Thirty-two percent of Black schools reported “frequently” employing “the problem method,” 11 percent reported frequently using “field trips in general subjects,” 11 percent reported using “field trips in vocational subjects,” 19 percent reported using the “library for instructional purposes,” and 15 percent reported using laboratory work in science.Footnote 44 These numbers only lagged slightly behind the data reported by White schools. Although it would be an exaggeration to depict pedagogical progressivism in Black schools as a mass movement, these numbers demonstrate that pedagogical reforms during the 1920s and 1930s expanded well beyond the celebrated experiments in Cincinnati, New Orleans, Charlotte, and Harlem. In their pursuit of purposeful pedagogy that combined practical, academic, and creative knowledge in the 1920s, Black educators implemented pedagogically progressive ideas such as the activity method. Furthermore, Black pedagogical progressives sought to adopt approaches that collapsed the dualisms of mind/body, theory/practice, and utilitarian/academic knowledge, just as many Dewey-inspired White educators were also doing. However, Black pedagogical progressives were careful to define community as one that included and valued Black/African experiences, issues, and art forms.
Teaching for Democracy
In the 1920s and 1930s, Black educators continued to pursue student-centered pedagogy that fused practical and academic content through hands-on learning while also focusing on the development of students’ democratic dispositions. As Madeline Morgan, a Black elementary school teacher in Chicago, related, pedagogical progressivism required fighting “discrimination, restrictions, exploitations, and varied subtle and direct forms of persecution” by imbuing students with “the responsibility of educating … citizens to live together in a democratic society.”Footnote 45
In 1928, Edna M. Colson, the Director of the Division of Education at Virginia State College, proposed a sophisticated and holistic approach to pedagogical progressivism that centered on the development of democratic practices. She quoted the work of leading White educators such as Dewey, as well as Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, to make a case for a more civic-centered curriculum focused on “certain specific needs, some of which are peculiar to Negro children.” Colson argued that Black schools needed to move beyond imitating the curriculum of White schools to develop skills and disposition unique to the Black experience. “For sixty years we have taught in our schools what others have taught in theirs, the time has come now when we must teach more effectively. We must take up the case of the negro child and the curriculum.” Student-centered methods not only were a more modernized and more humane way to teach, she argued, but also better prepared students for the world they were going to face. Rather than passively giving students the answer in a book—“a short-cut made to save time and energy”—teachers ought to have students work out the answers collectively for themselves. By doing so, Colson averred, students will “develop cooperation, regard for the rights of others, initiative, some originality, and perhaps the beginning of the power of leadership.”Footnote 46 Given the reality of education in the under-resourced Black schools of the South, the task she outlined was challenging. Yet her focus on civic education was central and explicit:
Many [students] will drop out of school before they reach the point where the course of study requires civics; many will leave before they reach the fifth year where we begin formal instruction in history. If something is not done by the school, to build up right attitudes toward the community and the law, experience will build wrong ones. Laying the foundation for right civic attitudes is probably the most difficult and yet one of the most important objectives of a curriculum planned for the Negro children. It is difficult first, because we must teach cooperation and loyalty in a community where the most marked divisions are based on imaginary and artificial reasons (I have reference to segregations and discriminations due to prejudice); and second, because the parents have little or no active interest in civil matters.Footnote 47
Recognizing how the educational barriers of racial oppression, undereducated and skeptical parents, and high dropout rates for Black children served to undermine her vision, Colson insisted that a redesigned curriculum could overcome them. However, what she failed to address was how White supremacists used poll taxes, literacy tests, and threats of violence to disenfranchise an entire generation of Black voters in the South, who included the parents of the students she was hoping to inspire toward civic efficacy. Although she did not explicitly name voting as a form of civic participation (perhaps, out of fear of reprisal), her emphasis on developing these dispositions in her students reflected a rising political activism that was tied to pedagogical progressivism.
Also in 1928, Benjamin Brawley wrote an essay on teacher education for the Southern Workman in which he identified an important shift that had taken place in Black educational thought. Brawley, a professor of English at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a well-known textbook author, explained: “A new conception of the importance of this matter will come to our Negro people and the whole American public when they go back to the fundamental purpose of all our work in education. The purpose is the training of our future citizens.” Brawley’s focus on citizenship was both descriptive and prescriptive because it highlighted the ongoing work of teachers like Colson in introducing the merits and mechanisms of democracy for Black students, and it also emphasized the need for greater focus on the constitutional rights that Black people were being denied.Footnote 48 One of the most effective ways to pursue citizenship education was to engage in democratic practices such as voting, speech-giving, simulations, and historical reenactments in the classroom. The physical embodiment of freedom in the classroom was a central component of Black pedagogical progressivism—what historian Jarvis Givens called embodied learning. “Through dramatizations, pageants, rituals, and class assignments,” Givens concludes, “students became bodies in dissent.”Footnote 49
To this end, in 1930 students at the Valena C. Jones school in New Orleans were introduced to US governance via a school-wide simulation of the American republic in which each class was aligned with a state, and students were elected to mock Senate and House of Representatives that passed laws on appropriate behavior for the classrooms and hallways.Footnote 50 This activity was meant to mirror the political work that adult activists were carrying out at the local level. Among them was the school’s principal, Fannie C. Williams, who was active in the New Orleans Seventh Ward Civic League. Williams and other Civic League members had “waged a rather intensive educational campaign, creating a desire for better citizenship, better educational facilities, and more respectful regard for the rights and privileges, vouchsafed to us by our National Constitution.” She hoped that her civic victories, which included having several new schools built (including her own), and getting “Negro history in the curriculum of all colored schools to perpetuate Negro achievements,” would inspire not only her students to fight for their rights, but also their parents.Footnote 51 As Williams explained:
In this great civic battle the [Civic] League was victorious, under the urge to love life and live upward, many colored men and women of this city today are prepared to exercise their prerogatives as citizens, that never before thought it possible, many children are kept in school whose parents were heretofore disinterested or skeptical as to the good that would come from education, the doctrine of race patronage, race consciousness, racial uplift and racial solidarity, has been preached, and we hope in the future years to see racial enterprises spring up and flourish because, and as a result of unselfish efforts of this loyal group of civic workers.Footnote 52
Such overt political agitation for better schooling and civil rights was rare in the South; most educators took a more subtle path. In Chicago, teacher-activist Madeline Morgan, working at Emerson Elementary School, developed an approach that tied student-centered methods to the lived experiences and needs of Depression-era Black students and their families on Chicago’s Near West Side. Morgan was trained at the Chicago Normal College, where White educator Francis Wayland Parker had developed much of the early theorizing foundational to pedagogical progressivism, and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from Northwestern University, whose dean of education was Ernest O. Melby, a White progressive pedagogue who studied at Teachers College, Columbia University. Melby recruited six faculty members from Teachers College to work at Northwestern during the 1930s and taught courses himself, ensuring that his progressive belief in the school as “the primary vehicle for reforming society” became part of the fabric of Northwestern’s budding program.Footnote 53 In courses that Morgan took with Melby, her course papers reveal that she read widely from pedagogically progressive theorists such as Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, James Tufts, Ellwood Cubberley, and B. F. Skinner. From these experiences Morgan developed an approach to education that stressed the importance of “change, free intelligence, and social participation.”Footnote 54 However, as a Black educator, Morgan’s application of these principles was determined by her overarching goal of advancing racial equality through education.
One example of her approach was the Emerson School Bank Project, begun in the fall of 1937. The project arose from questions Morgan’s students asked about banking and savings, topics that were powerfully immediate as Chicago’s Black community struggled under the weight of the Great Depression. At Morgan’s school, Emerson Elementary, 95 percent of families subsisted on relief or held employment through the Works Progress Administration. To increase both her students’ knowledge and their sense of agency at a time of deep economic uncertainty, Morgan worked with her class to design an “experience unit,” which revolved around their co-creation of a school bank and reflected her progressive ideals of connecting schooling to the larger world, promoting the values of democratic citizenship, and the use of education towards social change.Footnote 55
The project unfolded in several phases and incorporated a multidisciplinary approach wherein students researched the past and present of banking through “pictures and stories” found in “history textbooks as well as story books,” practiced the computational skills needed to keep bank books so that “arithmetic became a living reality,” and took a field trip to the First National Bank of Chicago in order to enrich “their understanding of the affairs of a bank.” After this phase of research, the class planned and constructed its own functioning bank site, complete with a teller’s cage from shop materials. Morgan explained, “The boys obtained a long table from the Domestic Arts room and with the aid of cardboard and rods made it look like a cage.” Finally, they elected and trained a corps of student tellers, clerks, cashiers, managers, a president, and guards, who diligently calculated and carefully recorded each day’s deposits and withdrawals. This work was done independently by students themselves. “The officers operate the bank and refer to the teacher only when the bank workers have need for me,” Morgan wrote. Soon, what began as a class project was a functioning branch, open to the entire school and community.Footnote 56
In the first year, 1937, over 151 students used the Emerson School Bank. Beyond this group, former students often returned to reopen accounts to continue saving. Families also became involved. As Morgan wrote, “Often parents send money to be deposited in order to buy clothing for their children at Christmas time. Some parents have written notes asking for a withdrawal in order to buy food or coal.” Morgan credited the success of the project, which by 1939 had grown to 217 depositors and over $170 in total savings, to its connection to the real world of social problems. Because it was “modeled after the adult world,” she believed that it taught students “valuable social attitudes” concretized through “direct knowledge” and participation. Ultimately, her goal was to change the social reality of her students. As she put it, “My desire is to provide a situation that will become a way of living.” The Emerson School Bank provides a key example of how Black progressive educators used their pedagogy to directly address the needs and lived realities of the Black community. As the 1930s and 1940s continued, Morgan and others would go further, using progressive pedagogical theory to critique and challenge the underlying systems of anti-Blackness that led to disparities like those faced by her Emerson Elementary students.Footnote 57
At William A. Robinson’s Atlanta University Laboratory School, students participated in a range of pedagogically progressive activities that engaged “African and American Negro Culture.” At the beginning of a unit on Black adult life in Atlanta, students were asked to bring newspaper and magazine articles on American Negro life and were introduced to the library. They then worked together to construct a map of Africa and present their work to the rest of the school in an assembly. “Nine-year-old Joyce drew African mask design for the paper programs which were hectographed for the audience,” teacher Helen A. Whiting related in 1935 in the journal Progressive Education. After the presentation, “the children of both grades became very anxious to see African animals,” so the classes took a trip to the local zoo. Building on this enthusiasm, the children were presented with readings on “the achievement of the African Negro and the American Negro in the arts,” many of which Whiting had authored herself in children’s books such as World Borrowings and African Myths and Negro Folk Tales. Footnote 58
After the unit, Whiting reported, the students demonstrated “appreciable growth in language arts and the content subjects, but it was in the graphic arts, in music, and dance that these children made their outstanding growth.”Footnote 59 Reflecting the higher incomes and educational levels of the local Black community around the University, the teachers at the Laboratory School were less concerned with connecting the academic subject matter to practical, real-world activities than they were with allowing the students to express their individual personalities. This strand of pedagogical progressivism was prominent in the affluent progressive White experiments, such as the Dalton and Walden Schools, but, as demonstrated by the Atlanta Lab School, Black progressive schools also took up student-centered artistic expression. One Lab School graduate recalled how she learned “cooperation,” “how to discuss,” and “how to plan work together” at the school. “When we get out of school into life, we have to be able to plan our own affairs,” she reasoned. “So while we are in school we ought to learn to plan for ourselves what we are going to do and how and why.”Footnote 60
One well-documented example of a student-planned unit at the Lab School was a unit centered on the biology of human reproduction. Seeking to move beyond students “acquiring and memorizing facts more or less as they were presented chapter by chapter in the chosen textbook,” Biology teacher Beulah Boley asked students to generate ideas on their own about what they wanted to study en route to a more “democratic curriculum.” As Boley and Robinson related, “Pupil participation in the choice and planning of the units increased to the extent that finally the entire course was planned with their help.” The student suggestions revealed that “pupils were much more interested in learning about themselves than they were in devoting time and effort to many of the subjects usually treated in high-school biology textbooks.” One such topic was “How does a new life begin?” Although this topic was potentially controversial owing to its inevitable overlap with sex education, the teachers decided to explore the topic with students, having received encouragement by “pioneering teachers in the professional magazines on the subject.” They also decided to explore the topic “with boys and girls working together” as opposed to “segregated groups.”Footnote 61
To collectively explore the question of “How does a new life begin?” the teachers divided the class into groups that researched reproduction in flowering plants, non-flowering plants, animals, and humans, and they helped the students select age-appropriate books on each topic. As Boley and Robinson reported: “During this work period they made lists of new words, many diagrams and drawings and dissections, took careful notes, discussed their problems with each other and with the teacher, brought in articles from newspapers in complete form to be filed in their individual folders.” Furthermore, students incubated eggs, observed plants, and invited a psychologist, a physician, and three mothers from the Parent-Teacher Association to participate in a class discussion, which revealed many student misconceptions that were clarified, though “criticisms were made privately so as not to disturb the democratic feeling of the group.”Footnote 62
The pedagogically progressive initiatives at the Atlanta University Laboratory School were support by the Georgia State Department of Education. Over eight thousand Black and White educators met in racially segregated groups between 1934 and 1937 to update the curriculum to better reflect the recent priority on citizenship education. In 1938, the Georgia Department of Education published The Open Road: A Teacher’s Study Guide for Child, Adult, and Community Development in Negro Elementary Schools of Georgia, which recommended approaching education as a “Life-Related Enterprise … [a] term [that] embodies the basic ideas of progressive education.” The report also endorsed the “activity program” as a key ingredient of the “progressive school.” A second resource published that year, Guide to Life-Related Teaching in the Negro High Schools of Georgia, suggested that Black students develop citizenship skills at the high school level by engaging in class elections and student councils and working to build interracial cooperation. The resources also recommended that teachers should develop their students’ practical life skills, a suggestion that was likely interpreted differently by White and Black educators.Footnote 63 For White leaders, this was an admonition to focus on the limited job and civic opportunities that Black students would likely face in the segregated South, but for Black educators it was an invitation to develop racial pride and civic efficacy, as demonstrated by the curriculum of Atlanta University Lab School.
If traditional pedagogy was best characterized as teacher-and-textbook-based instruction aimed at developing student memory and character, then progressive pedagogy was aimed at connecting academic and everyday knowledge and developing the whole child, including their creative, physical, and democratic potential through purposeful action. At a time when most Black Americans could not act freely in public, openly express their views, or participate fully in politics, the experiences students had in these pedagogically progressive classrooms that focused on the development of democratic dispositions took on additional significance. Through embodied learning that fused academic and practical knowledge, Black children could play roles, learn facts, and have experiences they were not able to have outside the classroom, and then share their findings with the broader Black community. Doing so allowed them to envision a different and better future that they could one day bring into being.
Conclusion
On June 6, 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a commencement address to the faculty and students at Howard University, one of the nation’s most prominent historically Black schools. He used his speech to revisit the debate between the industrial education and academic education camps, a “controversy” that he recognized had largely “colored and patterned” his own “educational thought.” Du Bois emphasized that this divide, which he said his younger listeners at Howard would have heard only “echoes of,” had been no mere “misunderstanding” but a real and foundational struggle over the direction of Black education and Black political and social advancement more broadly. However, as fervently committed as he had been early in his career to classical and academic learning, Du Bois now concluded that the only path forward for Black education was one in which vocational and academic education were fused. As he put the matter, “Just as the Negro college course with vision, knowledge and ideal must move toward vocational training, so the industrial courses must ascend from mere hand technique to engineering and industrial planning and the application of scientific and technical knowledge to the problems of work and wage.” Only such a synthesis, Du Bois argued, would shape “men and women” who were capable “not only to do the work of the world today but to provide for the future world.” For Du Bois, this call to prepare Black students to imagine and work toward a “future world” was the “essential and important difference” between the goals of White and Black educators. Faced with the evils of colonialism, racism, and economic exploitation, Black youth required an education that strengthened their commitment to radical democracy and broad humanism, as well as their capacity to enact these values in the world through political and economic means. Neither of the partial approaches—values without means to make them reality, or means without purposeful and intelligent direction—would do.Footnote 64
Throughout the Progressive Era, Black educators worked to bring Du Bois’s vision to life, experimenting with new methods of teaching and learning to equip their students with both academic and practical knowledge in service of racial justice and social change. Teachers and school leaders transformed classrooms into cities and states in miniature to train students in collective deliberation and effective democratic action. They expanded the curriculum to incorporate student interest and choice, exploring and embracing Black history and culture, subjects wholly excluded from the White-authored teaching materials. They coordinated field trips, projects, and hands-on activities that connected their classrooms to the real world through the local concerns of the Black communities in which they lived and worked. Ultimately, Black educators pushed the boundaries of the larger progressive movement, adapting its central tenets and reinterpreting its core principles for use in the larger struggle for racial advancement.
This kind of pedagogical refashioning has implications for the present. It pushes us to abandon any reductive narrative of Black education that focuses on a binary between practical and academic knowledge, as such a distinction was ultimately rejected both by scholars like Du Bois and by Black K-12 administrators and teachers on the ground. It also encourages us to look more closely at how Black educators past and present take up and rework dominant discourses, using them to articulate new visions of Black freedom through education.
Thomas Fallace is Professor of Education at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He is author of five books on curriculum and intellectual history, most recently You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Michael Hines is Assistant Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He researches the educational activism of Black teachers, students, and communities and is author of A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools (Beacon Press, 2022).
