An African American Educator in the Context of His Time: George Washington Trenholm, 1871–1925 (2020)

An African American Educator in the Context of His Time: George Washington Trenholm, 1871–1925 Michael Fultz (bio) George washington trenholm was born in december 1871 in rural Shelby County, Alabama, two miles north of the small town of Calera, one of eleven children. His parents were ex-slaves. He died in August 1925, not quite fifty-four years old, holding the position of president of the Alabama State Normal School for Colored Students at Montgomery. During his lifetime, Trenholm graduated from the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes in 1896; served as principal of Tuscumbia Colored School from 1896 to 1916; and was Alabama’s State Conductor of Institutes for Negro Teachers and its Supervisor of Negro Teacher Training from 1916 to 1920. This article does not attempt to provide a detailed account of Trenholm’s life and his many accomplishments; rather, it presents an annotated biography of sorts, an attempt to contextualize Trenholm’s life and career so as to personalize and illuminate the contours of African American education across the decades spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, years often characterized as the “nadir” of black life in the United States.1 When Trenholm began his formal education in the late 1870s, the public schools of Shelby County were beginning to display, in various ways, the discriminatory trends that would become more pronounced [End Page 246] across the state of Alabama over the next several decades. According to the 1880 state superintendent of education’s report, when Trenholm would have been around eight-years-old, only sixteen black teachers were employed throughout Shelby County---eight women and eight men---providing instruction in an equal number of one-teacher schools. These classrooms were far more crowded than those for white students: black schools employed one teacher for every thirty pupils in average daily attendance; for whites, the figure was one teacher for nineteen pupils in attendance. School terms for white students averaged eighty-nine days a year, while those for African American students averaged seventy-five days.2 Though such educational conditions often foster discouragement and early school withdrawal, Trenholm persevered. In 1890, at age eighteen, he left Shelby County to attend Marion Baptist Academy, a private school founded in 1880 by several Baptist associations in Perry County in the state’s Black Belt. After two years at Marion Baptist, receiving a foundation in what might be considered upper elementary and grammar school coursework, Trenholm matriculated at the State Colored Normal and Industrial School at Huntsville, which in 1891 had been designated Alabama’s black land-grant institution. He graduated in 1896, the year the school was renamed State Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, the highest-ranked in his class of thirty-one students.3 The State Colored Normal and Industrial Institute was established by the Alabama legislature in 1873 and opened in a church facility in downtown Huntsville in the spring of 1875 with sixty-one students [End Page 247] and two instructors, funded by a mere $1,000 appropriation. It was Alabama’s second state normal school for African Americans, chartered a few days after the same 1873 legislature transformed the American Missionary Association’s (AMA) Lincoln Normal School, located in Marion, into the State Normal School and University for Colored Teachers and Students. Alabama was unusually active among southern states with regard to establishing teacher training programs, having also chartered a state normal school for white students in 1872; it opened in Florence the next year. The Tuskegee State Normal School, with Booker T. Washington at its helm, opened in 1881. By 1890, Alabama had seven state normal schools, four for whites (the most in any Deep South state) and three for African Americans (second, behind North Carolina, which had five). Although attendance at these publicly funded teacher training facilities was never particularly large in the late nineteenth century, they provided prospective teachers, both black and white, with opportunities to elevate their own academic abilities and important instruction in the art and science of practical pedagogy.4 When Trenholm enrolled at Colored Normal and Industrial in 1892, it was a growing institution. Enrollment was 306 in 1894 (164 men and 142...