"A Toilet in the Middle of the Court House Square": The Summer Teaching Institute of 1915 and the Influence of Booker T. Washington on Negro Teacher Education in Alabama

The faces ofBlack and White men and women stare back from the sepia-colored pages of the past. These images, set between the pages of a tattered black photograph album, are a record ofa bygone era. Men and women, Blacks and Whites, all gathered together to record their experiences of the summer of 1915: the setting, rural Alabama, the participants, Negro teachers, White supervisors, and a special category of educators known as Jeanes Teachers, named after the philanthropic fund which supported their activities. The story of the summer of 1915 is one of learning, dedication, and achievement. It represents a piece of Negro history in Alabama which has all but been forgotten-Negro self-help, White involvement in Negro education, and the nature of Black rural communities. The Civil Rights rhetoric and highly"profiled achievements ofBlacks during the 1950s and 1960s has likely eclipsed the story of the slow-but-steady progress made by a handful of Negro leaders and scores of Negro followers, especially in the rural South, decades earlier. This paper, however, is not an attempt to s~ow that every cloud has a silver lining, but rather to illuminate a small piece ofhistory that has heretofore largely gone unnoticed. It is also an attempt to draw connections between the educational thought of Booker T. Washington and that of Progressive Era reformers such as John Dewey so that Washington's educational philosophy may be considered less as accommodationist politics and more as sound educational theory. In order to understand the "Summer of 1915" and its meaning to Negro teacher education as well as rural Negro education, one must first understand the education path many rural southern Negroes followed, that of industrial education. The course ofsouthern Negro education was set when Booker T. Washington graduated from the Hampton Ipstitute in 1875 (Bond, 1934). Washington, born into slavery, came under the influence of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of the Hampton Institute, and former military commander during the Civil War (Bullock, 1967, 76). Washington, who, decades after his work on behalf of rural Negro education,