page_title: Calhoun Colored School
section_title: Hampton-Tuskegee model
hierarchical_section_title: Calhoun Colored School / School history / Hampton-Tuskegee model
caption_attribution_description: Social Settlements: United States. Alabama. Calhoun. Calhoun Colored School: Agencies Promoting Assimilation of the Negro. Training Negro Girls in Domestic Science. Calhoun Colored School, Calhoun, Ala.: Cooking Class.
context_page_description: The Calhoun Colored School was a private boarding and day school in Calhoun, Lowndes County, Alabama, about 28 miles southwest of the capital of Montgomery. It was founded in 1892 by Charlotte Thorn and Mabel Dillingham, from New England, in partnership with Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, to provide education to rural black students. African Americans comprised the majority in this area, and the state had segregated facilities. Calhoun Colored School was first designed to educate rural black students according to the industrial school model common at the time.
  In addition, the school sponsored a land bank that helped 85 families buy land. It created a joint venture with the county to improve a local road so farmers could get their products to market. As the school developed, it raised its standards, created a large library, and offered more of an academic curriculum.
context_section_description: Washington, Thorn and Dillingham developed the Calhoun Colored School according to the Hampton-Tuskegee model. First, students would receive a basic elementary education and then an industrial education at the high school level. This model envisioned preparing students for the work available in the rural areas in which most of them lived. Boys would become farmers and perhaps skilled tradesmen, and girls would become wives and homemakers, as well as laundresses, dressmakers, or domestic workers. The best students were encouraged to become teachers and work in the community or outlying areas to promote further education along the Hampton-Tuskegee model. There was a great push to continue to improve literacy among both children and adults, and teaching was a high calling.
  Second, the school was to be apolitical. The education was not designed to encourage African Americans to challenge the status quo. African Americans were offered a basic education that enabled them to return to their communities and support themselves within the system. Washington feared that if a colored school challenged the politics of the day, white citizens might refuse to allow it to open or would later shut it down. This was not the classical type of education offered to many white students in the north, but rural white students did not have access to such education either.
  Highly educated African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois thought the Tuskegee model was too limited and did not support it. Born in Massachusetts and educated in the North, including a doctorate at Harvard University, he argued for ensuring that the most talented students could get a full academic education, to advance the race.
  In October 1892 the co-principals Thorn and Dillingham met with 300 blacks from the area who wanted to learn more about their plans to start a school. Many of the adults who came to the first meeting would work to build the teachers' cottages, schoolhouses, barn, shop and dormitories that by 1896 comprised the full campus. N.J. Bell of Montgomery donated the initial 10 acres (40,000 m²) of land for the site of the school. By 1896 the school had a working farm of 100 acres (0.40 km²); 300 pupils, of whom 40 were boarders; and 13 teachers.
  The Hampton-Tuskegee model was based on educating African Americans to build their lives from basic skills. Critics thought that it conformed to white expectations of low aspirations for blacks in the South during this period. But it also related to the needs of the chiefly rural economy of Alabama. It did not emphasize human agency or empowerment for change, and most white citizens and some blacks would not have supported such an idea then.
caption: A cooking class at the Calhoun School.
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