Educational Justice

Jody Victor: Booker Taliaferro was born into slavery on April 5, 1856, to Jane, an enslaved African-American, on the Burroughs Plantation, a small farm in backcountryVirginia. Booker’s mother never identified his white father, who was said to be a nearby planter. After emancipation in 1865, Booker’s mother moved the family to rejoin her husband, freedman Washington Ferguson, in Malden,West Virginia. The two freed slaves were formally married in Malden. Extreme poverty ruled out regular schooling for Booker. At the young age of nine he began working first in the salt furnaces and later in a coal mine.

Determined to educate himself  Booker set out in 1872 for Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (now Hampton University), a teachers’ college established to educate freedmen. He traveled hundreds of miles under great hardship to get there. When he arrived at Hampton he took his stepfather’s first name-Washington-as his surname. Washington worked as a janitor to pay his expenses. Washington became a star pupil under the tutelage of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the head of Hampton. He graduated from Hampton in 1875. In 1876 Washington returned to Malden, where he taught children in the daytime and adults at night for two years. He also taught Sunday school at African Zion Baptist Church.

In 1878 Washington studied for six months at Wayland Seminary inWashington, D.C.and then joined the teaching staff of Hampton. General Armstrong, still the head of Hampton, approached Washington one day after chapel. He told Washington he had received a letter from some “gentlemen in Alabama”. They were asking General Armstrong to recommend a white principle for a colored school they wanted to open in the town of Tuskegee.

In 1881 Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama. He started with two small run-down buildings, no equipment and very little money. He used his ability to win the trust of white Southerners and Northern philanthropists to make Tuskegee into a model school of industrial education. His cooperative nature helped to raise funds to establish and operate thousands of small community schools and institutions of higher education for the betterment of African-Americans throughout the South. Washingtonbelieved that the best interests for African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction era would be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills. He cultivated in his students the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift. Tuskegee was a monument to his life’s work. By the time of his death thirty-four years later,Tuskegee had more than 100 well-equipped buildings, 1,500 students, and 200 faculty members teaching 38 trades and professions.

On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington became a national hero. He was invited to speak to a racially mixed audience at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. He urged his fellow freedmen, most of whom were poor and illiterate, to set aside their efforts to win full civil rights and concentrate their energies instead on education. He said that he believed education was the path to economic success and economic success would bring social justice. With his life’s work Booker T. Washington did much to improve the working relationship between the races. He became friends with such self-made men as Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers; Sears, Roebuck and Company President Julius Rosenwald; and George Eastman, inventor and founder of Kodak. He enlisted his philanthropic network to create matching funds programs to stimulate numerous rural public schools for African-American children in the South. The Rosenwald Fund helped support the construction and operation of more than 5,000 schools and supporting resources. The local schools were a source of communal pride and were priceless to African-American families. In 1900 he founded the National Negro Business League and in 1901 he published his autobiography, Up From Slavery, which was translated into many languages. In all, he wrote fourteen books.  Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft used Washington as an advisor. He went on to receive honorary degrees from Harvard Universityand Dartmouth College.

Jody Victor

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.” …. “Character is power.”- Booker T. Washington

Jane Addams

Jody Victor: (Laura) Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860 inCedarville,Illinois. Jane Addams was the youngest of eight children. Three of her siblings died in infancy and another died at the age of sixteen. Her mother, Sarah Weber Addams, died shortly after a stillbirth when Jane was just two years old. Jane Addams’ father, John Huey Addams, was an agricultural businessman with large holdings in timber and cattle, plus flour and timber mills and a woolen factory. Growing up Jane adored her father and was determined to never disappoint him. He was the President of The Second National Bank ofFreeport. He was a Quaker and a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party. He served for sixteen years as an Illinois State Senator. John Addams was a friend of Abraham Lincoln, supporting him in his candidacies (Illinois Senator and President) and fought as an officer in the Civil War. John Addams kept a letter fromLincolnin his desk. Jane loved to look at the letter as a child. Jane learned from her father honesty, humility and a concern for those less fortunate.

Jane Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading voraciously and attending Sunday school. When she was four years old she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, Potts’s disease, which caused a curvature in her back and lifelong health problems. As a child Jane thought she was “ugly” and would walk down the other side of the street when she and her father, in his Sunday best, would walk to church. She did not want to embarrass him. When Jane was six years old her father took her to visit a mill town. She was deeply moved by the squalor of the homes around the mill. It was then that she decided when she grew up she would live in a nice house. But it would not be with other nice houses; rather it would be among houses such as the ones she saw that day.

John Addams remarried in 1868, when Jane was eight years old. His second wife, Anna Hostetter Haldeman, was the widow of a miller in Freeport. She had two sons: Harry (20 at the time of her remarriage) and George (aged 7). In her teens, Jane had big dreams to do something useful in the world. Her readings of Dickens made her interested in the poor as did her step-mother’s kindness to the poor in Cedarville. She decided she would become a doctor so she could live and work among the poor. In 1875, Jane’s sister Alice married their stepbrother Harry Haldeman.

Jane Addams’ father encouraged her to pursue higher education, but not too far from home. She wanted to attend the brand-new college for women,Smith Collegein Northampton, Massachusetts. Instead, her father sent her to Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) inRockford,Ill inois. After graduating valedictorian fromRockfordin 1881, with a collegiate certificate, she still hoped to attend Smith to earn a proper B.A. She was granted her bachelor’s degree one year later whenRockford became accredited asRockford College for Women.

The summer after Jane graduated fromRockfordher father died unexpectedly from appendicitis. Each of the children inherited $50,000 (equivalent to $1.3 million today). That fall Jane, Alice and Harry, and their stepmother Anna moved to Philadelphia so that the three young people could pursue medical educations. Harry was already trained in the medical field and studied further at theUniversityofPennsylvania. Jane and Alice completed their first year of medical school at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. But Jane’s health problems prevented her from completing the degree. Stepmother Anna was also ill so the entire family canceled their plans to stay 2 years and moved back to Cedarville. The following fall Harry performed surgery on Jane’s back to straighten it. He then advised that she not pursue her studies right away, but travel instead. In August 1883, Jane Addams set off for a two-year tour of Europewith her stepmother. Visiting the Catacombs inRome, where the early Christians from all walks of life lived and worshiped together in secret, Jane decided that she did not have to become a doctor to help the poor.

Upon her return home, Jane gathered clues about her future from what she read. Fascinated by the early Christians and Tolstoy’s book My Religion, she was baptized a Christian in the Cedarville Presbyterian Church. She read Mazzini’s Duties of Man and began to be inspired by the idea of democracy as a social ideal. Then in the summer of 1887, Jane read in a magazine about the new idea of a settlement house. She believed she had finally found something she could actually do. She decided to visit the world’s first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, inLondon’sEast End. Jane invited some friends, including Ellen Gates Starr, a friend from Rockford Female Seminary, to join her on her second tour ofEurope. Together they traveled in Europefrom December 1887 through the summer of 1888. At first, Jane had told none of them about her dream to start a settlement house. But as they traveled she became increasingly guilt-ridden that she was just being a tourist and not acting on her dream. Finally, believing that if she told someone of her dream, she might do something about it, she told Ellen Gates Starr. Starr loved the idea of starting a settlement house and agreed to join her.

When Jane Addams visited Toynbee Hall she was enchanted. She described it as “a community of  University men who live there, have their recreation clubs and society all among the poor people, yet in the same style in which they would live in their own circle. It is….so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries that it seems perfectly ideal.” Her dream of the classes mingling socially to mutual benefit, as they had in early Christian circles, seemed embodied in the new type of institution. The co-founders of Toynbee Hall, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, shared Jane’s desire to bring Christianity back to its roots. They called it a “social Christian” movement. The Barnetts had no interest in converting anyone to Christianity but they did believe that Christians should be more engaged with the world. Jane Addams was determined to open a similar settlement house in an underprivileged area of Chicago.

In 1899 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull in Chicago, Illinois. The run-down mansion had been built in 1856 and needed repairs and upgrading. At first, Jane Addams paid for all of the repairs and operating expenses. Eventually gifts from individuals, even in the first year, began to support Hull House. A number of wealthy women became donors to the House. Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr were the first to move in to Hull House with the purpose being to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial sections of Chicago. Their three “ethical principles” were “to teach by example, to practice cooperation, and to practice social democracy”. Addams made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood and convinced young women of well-to-do families to help. She took care of children, nursed the sick and listened to the troubles of impoverished people. By its second year Hull House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning and club meetings for older children in the afternoon. In the evening more clubs were available for adults as were courses in what became virtually a night school, a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. The first facility added to Hull House was an art gallery. The second was a public kitchen. Then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a bathhouse, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, and a labor museum. Hull House eventually became a thirteen-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp, Bowen Country Club.

As Jane Addams’ reputation grew so did her invitations to get involved in larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed toChicago’s Board of Education. Addams was a formative member of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. The following year she became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. InChicagoshe led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies and sanitary conditions. She even went so far as to accept the post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward. In 1910, Jane Addams received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman byYaleUniversity. She stressed the role of children in the Americanization of new immigrants. In her book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, she argued that play and recreation programs were needed for social collective interaction. She served as the first vice-president of the Playground Association of America. Jane Addams was a leader in women’s suffrage. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed the vote to be effective in doing so.

In 1906 Jane Addams gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsinsummer session, which she published the next year as a book titled Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke and campaigned extensively for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Presidential campaign on the ‘Progressive’ party. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of thePeacePalaceatThe Hague. For the next two years she was sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation to do a series of lectures against America’s entry into the First World War. In 1915 she accepted the chairmanship of the Women’s Peace Party, an American organization, and months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened atThe Hague. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Jane Addams was chosen and served as president until 1929. Publically opposed toAmericaentering the war, Jane Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution. OnceAmericabecame involved in the war she worked as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations. Even though it was a war effort she had found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses. She re-told her story of the relief effort in her book- Peace and Bread in Time of War.

Jane Addams worked tirelessly at Hull House and with labor unions and other organizations all her adult life to address the problems of poverty and crime. In 1926 Jane Addams suffered a heart attack and her health began to fail. Even so, she continued working. Addams was admitted to aBaltimorehospital on December 10, 1931, the very day that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo, Norway. She was the first U.S.woman to win the prize.  Jane Addams died on May 21, 1935 in Chicago. She is remembered today as a pioneer in the field of social work and one of America’s early pacifists.

Jody Victor

“America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.” – Jane Addams