In 1912, the 50th Anniversary of Penn School on St. Helena Island marked an important milestone: A heritage celebration of the first school in the American South erected to educate formerly enslaved West Africans; and the transition into the Hampton-Tuskegee industrial education curriculum, made famous by Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. This transition was guided by Hampton Institute Principal and Penn Normal Industrial and Agricultural School (PNIAS) Chairman Hollis Burke Frissell.
The following items depict black Gullah and Geechee pupils, predominately male, through the lens of the New Negro: a proud, successful, and self-sufficient black man, no longer tethered to the history of slavery.
The Penn School photos that frame Penn pupils as the New Negro, images of black males wearing suits and standing tall, appear empowering. However, within larger Penn School Papers context, especially fund-raising materials, the same black man photographed through the lens of the New Negro suddenly appears trapped as a black body measured for achievement within and by white context—and susceptible to descending back to the Negro Problem.
This booklet is a crucial artifact in surfacing the attitudes of Penn's white Northern educators toward their Gullah and Geechee pupils. As Alain Locke described in The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925): “Of all the voluminous literature on the Negro, so much is mere external view and commentary that we may warrantably say that nine-tenths of it is about the Negro rather than of him, so that it is the Negro problem rather than the Negro that is known and mooted in the general mind" (p. ix). What can be gleaned about the experiences of black pupils, from the words of Penn School's white administrators?
Hollis Burke Frissell, Chairman of PNIAS, often praised St. Helena Island as "a unique experiment station" in black education because of the island's isolation from mainland Beaufort, South Carolina, as seen in the "Our Appeal" section of the School's 1900-1908 fund-raising booklet shown here. The distance white Penn School administrators created between themselves and their black pupils is outlined well by Dr. Elizabeth Jacoway's definition of missionary mentality: "a disposition not simply to expect deference from the disadvantaged masses, but to crusade with evangelical zeal, and with unexamined arrogance, for 'backward' people to abandon their threatening differences and assimilate the traditional values." (Jacoway 1980 p. 17)
While Booker T. Washington’s approach to education was very pragmatic and laudable in many black communities, it also appealed to white Northerners who became increasingly more uncomfortable with black Americans moving North in the first round of the Great Migration. One of those white Northerners was Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a pivotal educator in the lives of Washington and Hollis Burke Frissell. Samuel's philosophy of "Black Reconstruction" advocated for the removal of black voters and politicians from Southern political life, and the relegation of black workers to the lowest forms of labor in the Southern economy—preserving white supremacy in the American South (Anderson 1988).
The labor of Penn graduates supplied labor to the American South, aiding economic prosperity for all—and maintaining the status quo of white supervision in industry and education.
At the dedication ceremony in 1912 of the Cope Industrial Building, Hollis Burke Frissell (photographed far right) praised the completion of building and advocated for the continued self-improvement of all black people of St. Helena Island. The never-ending path towards black self-improvement was a hallmark of Hampton Institute, founded by Samuel Armstrong Chapman and principled by Frissell, and became a hallmark of PNIAS. By equating hard labor with developing strong moral character, Frissell and Chapman advocated for a brand of the New Negro that would serve their own self-interests of returning economic prosperity in the American South through black disenfranchisement.
In 1925, Alain Locke described the process of becoming the New Negro as “shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem” towards “achieving something like a spiritual emancipation” (p. 4). As highlighted throughout this section, the definition of the New Negro was determined by the author. While Locke envisioned the New Negro as a self-sufficient and self-determining black American, Frissell and Chapman envisioned the New Negro as a self-subordinating, apolitical laborer under white supervision.