Virginia Vignettes » Education

What Was the Brafferton School?

VFHwebdev — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:00:08 +0000

Brafferton was the College of William and Mary’s school for American Indians, after Harvard likely the second oldest in British North America. The College’s 1693 charter provided that the new “place of universal study” educate not only English but also American Indian youth. College founder James Blair arranged financing using income from Brafferton Manor in Yorkshire, England, which had passed to the estate of scientist Robert Boyle. The School would “civilize” Indian youth, prepare them for Anglican priesthood – and produce interpreters and cultural liaisons who could aid Britain’s colonial expansion.

William and Mary launched Brafferton School in 1700, and from the start met Indian resistance to enrolling and boarding their children there. Much of the enrollment was forced, with various groups dispatching captive children from enemy tribes to Brafferton. This was the case for the first six students. Enrollment waxed in eras of frontier conflict and waned at other times. In 1712 there were 20 Indian scholars; by 1721 there were none. Attendance revived after construction of a dedicated building in 1723. After the Revolutionary War broke out, income from the Boyle estate was diverted to the West Indies, and by 1779, Brafferton School’s doors had closed for good.

For Further Reading:

Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History

Who founded Virginia’s colleges?

VFHwebdev — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:00:31 +0000

Although the College of William and Mary had been chartered in 1693, it was competition among the Protestant churches in the 18th and 19th centuries that contributed to advances in higher education in Virginia. Each denomination had to have a college, primarily for the instruction of its ministers. Following the lead of the Presbyterians, who founded Washington and Hampden-Sydney colleges, Methodists established Randolph-Macon and Emory and Henry; Baptists founded a seminary that later became Richmond College; Lutherans had Roanoke College; and the Disciples of Christ founded Bethany College. Churches also established three female institutes for women before 1861, two of which were the predecessors of Hollins and Mary Baldwin colleges.

Yet the preeminent institution of higher learning in the state was the deliberately nonsectarian University of Virginia, chartered by the assembly in 1819 at the behest of its founder, Thomas Jefferson, to whom it owed everything: its setting, architecture, library, curriculum, and professors. The assembly created another public institution in 1839: Virginia Military Institute, the first state military college in the country.

Further Reading

Anne Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860.

How did the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 affect Virginia?

VFHwebdev — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:00:39 +0000

The Morrill Land-Grant Act transformed American education, establishing what became a network of state-run colleges and universities combining practical and academic teaching. Two Virginia universities owe their beginnings to it, and a third benefited as well.

Proposed by Rep. Justin Morrill (Vermont), it passed Congress in 1859 but President Buchanan vetoed it. Enacted in 1862 under Lincoln, it granted land to each state based on population, for establishing colleges focused on engineering, agriculture, and military sciences. States could also sell granted land and use the proceeds for these purposes. Confederate states were excluded; after the war the Act was extended to them.

After readmission to the Union in 1870, many schools vied for selection as Virginia’s flagship land-grant institution. In 1872, the small Olin and Preston Institute in rural Montgomery County was purchased by the Assembly and became Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College – which evolved into Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech); one-third of the state’s land-grant funds went to Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute (later University), for African Americans, American Indians, and others. In 1882, Virginia’s first four-year institution for African Americans, Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State University) was established near Petersburg.

Further Reading

Allan Nevins, The State Universities and Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962).

Joseph B. Edmond, The Magnificent Charter: The Origin and Role of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges and Universities (Hicksville NY: Exposition Press, 1978).

When did Virginia get its first public school system?

VFHwebdev — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:10:53 +0000

With no statewide public education system before the Civil War, the Underwood Constitution of 1868 mandated public schools. Over the objections of the traditionalists, one of whom labeled universal education a “Yankee error,” the new system was created in 1870 with enthusiastic support from freedpeople, poor whites, and middle-class groups, the very people for whom there had been few schools in the antebellum period. William Henry Ruffner was appointed superintendent of public instruction. A man of wide-ranging interests in scientific and social questions who had opposed slavery, Ruffner became an advocate of public free schools for both races, believing education produced more productive workers who contributed to economic growth and less criminal behavior. He designed a statewide system of racially segregated schools as mandated by the assembly. In the first year (1870-71), 130,000 students were taught in 2,900 schools; within five years enrollment reached 185,000. However, the system foundered on inadequate funding. Most rural schools were one-room, single-teacher schools; terms were approximately five months; and teachers’ pay averaged $30 a month. It was not until the twentieth century that Virginia began to address these deficiencies.

Further Reading

William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920.

Who was Lyon Tyler?

EV — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:30:25 +0000

Besides being a University of Virginia graduate, Richmond lawyer, historian and genealogist, he was the 14th of U.S. president John Tyler’s 16 children. Tyler’s most important achievement, however, was the resuscitation of the College of William and Mary following the Civil War. The school had been dormant nearly seven years due to war damage and low funding when Tyler, elected to the House of Delegates in 1887, began to lobby on its behalf. He procured $10,000 for the restoration of the school, and it re-opened in 1889 with Tyler at the helm teaching American history and political economy. At Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1901, he secured more permanent funding, establishing the college as a state-owned institution. Under his presidency, which lasted through 1919, the College educated many men who went on to assume prominent positions in the new school systems. Tyler also helped welcome the school’s first women students in 1915.

Further Reading:

Dan Monroe, “Lincoln the Dwarf: Lyon Gardiner Tyler’s War on the Mythical Lincoln.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (Winter 2003)

What is Christiansburg Institute?

VFHwebdev — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:39:26 +0000

For one solid century, from 1866 to 1966, Christiansburg Institute provided education, inspiration, and community for African Americans working to better themselves in the face of adversity. Located in southwest Virginia’s Montgomery County, Christiansburg Institute was founded in 1866 by Captain Charles Schaeffer, an agent of the Quaker Freedmen’s Bureau. It was the first school to provide secondary education for blacks in Southwest Virginia. In 1895, through the involvement of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Booker T. Washington advised the school in its transition to the industrial model of education. Christiansburg Institute principals such as Dr. Edgar Long provided leadership not only within the school, but in the larger community. The school closed in 1966 with the desegregation of Virginia’s schools.

Alumni organized in 1976 to save the last remaining academic building from the wrecking ball. Thanks to their hard work and the generosity of donors, Christiansburg Institute, Inc. has been re-established on four acres of the former farm campus. The Edgar A. Long Building, erected in 1927, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is recognized as a Virginia Historic Landmark. It serves as a museum, archive, and community learning center open to all.

Excerpted from the African American Heritage Database at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and brought to you by Encyclopedia Virginia at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Visit www.virginiavignettes.org for additional resources on this article and more information on Encyclopedia Virginia.

For Further Reading:

Long, Edgar A. (Edgar Allen), A Vision of Education: Selected Writings of Edgar A. Long

Christiansburg Institute website: http://www.christiansburginstitute.org/

Digitized images at University of Virginia Special Collections http://spec.lib.vt.edu/mss/cii.htm

Where and What is "My Home by the Sea"?

VFHwebdev — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:00:31 +0000

Hampton University students and alumni fondly refer to “My Home by the Sea,” evoking its picturesque setting at the edge of the Hampton River. Among the most prestigious of historically black colleges and universities, it began after the Civil War as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. As with other HBCU’s, it arose out of the long African-American struggle for education; its founding tapped what turned out to be fleeting post-war political and institutional opportunities, among them support from Northern philanthropists, religious organizations, and, most decisively, the federal Freedmen’s Bureau.

Under Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, responsible for thousands of newly emancipated persons thronging the port, old hospital wards at Fort Monroe were reincarnated as schoolrooms, and Hampton Institute opened its doors April 1st, 1868. Course offerings included farming, brick-making, and household work; Hampton also sought to prepare “select” African-American men and women as teachers and leaders.

Formal education for Americans Indians began in 1878 and continued until 1923, creating the first biracial education program in the country. More than 1300 Indian students from 65 tribes attended Hampton.

Booker T. Washington, Hampton’s most famous alumnus, applied the school’s principles in creating Tuskegee Institute, itself a hugely influential HBCU; another graduate, Robert S. Abbott, founded the Chicago Defender, the first truly national African-American publication. As a university and through its museum, Hampton continues to exert wide influence.

For Further Reading

Robert Francis Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and the Hampton Institute, 1839-1893

Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 1989, To Lead and to Serve: American Indian Education at Hampton Institute 1878-1923

Why did Virginia resort to "massive resistance" against school desegregation?

VFHwebdev — Mon, 14 May 2007 12:17:31 +0000

Traditional racial attitudes were certainly a factor in the creation of massive resistance. Age-old customs and attitudes that had been legalized for half a century were challenged by the Brown decision of 1954. The loudest voices defending the overturned separate-but-equal policy came from the Southside, where the black percentage of the population was highest and where fears of race mixing were strongest. But it also appears that Senator Harry Byrd and other Organization leaders perceived race as an issue with which to maintain their political domination in the state. Race and politics were reinforcing elements in Organization thinking because black emancipation, particularly through increased political participation, would threaten machine hegemony as well as race control. Predictably, then, Organization leaders fought changes in the poll tax or any civil rights legislation that promised to improve black voting opportunities. The Supreme Court’s school decision was perceived as another step in dismantling the entire Jim Crow system, including electoral control; it would have to be obstructed. A resolve to preserve the “Virginia Way” of managed race relations, along with political profit and racial conviction, dictated Byrd’s response to desegregation.

Further Reading

James W. Ely Jr., The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance.

J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 2002, UNC Press

Who Was Harry Byrd?

VFHwebdev — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:13:23 +0000

By virtue of service and power, Harry Flood Byrd Sr. was the most prominent Virginian of the twentieth century. As a state senator, governor, and U.S. senator, Byrd made notable contributions to his state and nation, but it was through his leadership of the Democratic political organization–the “Byrd machine”–that he wielded the authority that shaped the history of the commonwealth from 1922 to 1965. The legacy of his forty-year rule in Virginia was mixed. The senator always liked to say that he was a progressive conservative who favored “sound progress” within the bounds of fiscal restraint. His own solid governorship reflected this philosophy. His greatest gift to the state was a debt-free government that honestly and efficiently provided basic services to its citizens: good roads, law enforcement, and economic development. But as change engulfed the Old Dominion, Byrd did not keep pace. Honest and frugal government, while commendable, could not compensate for poorly funded colleges, inadequate mental hospitals, and neglected social services. And massive resistance was a discredited and dishonorable course that further obstructed advancement.

Further Reading:

Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia

How did the "Dixiecrats" do in Virginia?

VFHwebdev — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:43:04 +0000

Opposition to President Harry Truman’s civil rights proposals caused many Southerners to join a National States Rights Party and nominate Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president in 1948. These “Dixiecrats” hoped to unite the South behind Thurmond and throw the election into the House of Representatives. Not wanting to jeopardize the election prospects of Virginia Democrats running for office by endorsing Thurmond, Senator Harry Byrd opted for a “golden silence” that he hoped would imply a rejection of the president and encourage those so inclined to vote for the Dixiecrats. But loyal Democrats organized a “Straight Democratic Ticket Committee” to back Truman who, defying all the polls, won a smashing victory over Republican Thomas Dewey and Thurmond, who received only ten percent of the vote in the state. Nevertheless, the election did forecast a realignment of politics in the South and the era of “massive resistance” in which race came to dominate Southern elections for two decades.

Further Reading

James R. Sweeney, The Golden Silence: The Virginia Democratic Party and the Presidential Election of 1948, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (July 1974)