COURTESY OF DAN CORSON / HISTORY COLORADO
At left is a photo of Oliver Toussaint Jackson, who was manager at Boulder’s Chautauqua Dining Hall in 1898. He later operated a popular seafood restaurant at 55th and Arapahoe in Boulder. Below is a photo of Jackson’s wait staff setting up the Dining Hall.
Facing our history
How Chautauqua did — and did not — engage with race in its earliest days
By Caitlin Rockett
T
he second season of the Colorado Chautauqua was a success. Good thing, too, as a reporter from the Daily Camera wrote after the sixweek assembly wrapped up in 1899, because two years straight with lost profits would have surely shut the educational program down. But people were talking about building cottages along the foot of the mountains to better enjoy the Colorado Chautauqua the next summer — some had already leased lots. They’d been inspired and edified by presentations about the newest concepts in pedagogy and archeology, delighted in Shakespearean theater, and had their souls stirred by sermons from renowned ministers. And there was a bit of whitewashing history in there as well. George N. Aldredge, a judge from Texas (born in Georgia), gave a lecture called “Plantation Life in the South” on the final Saturday of the assembly. “[Aldredge] declared it to be a mistake that the slaves were brutally treated,” reported the Camera, “that while there were brutal masters and overseers they were the exception, not the rule, and that the masters and slaves loved each other and he doubted if the blacks had been much improved by their emancipation, 14
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though he believed it wrong for one man to own another and the whole South is glad that slavery has been destroyed.” Historian Sarah Bell came across this article when she was doing research for her dissertation about how the women’s suffrage movement used Chautauqua assemblies around the country to advance the cause; she would go on to find more examples of racism at the summer educational gatherings. On July 20, Bell will give a virtual presentation for the Colorado Chautauqua’s annual meeting exploring how the assemblies — at Boulder and elsewhere — did and did not engage with race during their heyday at the turn of the century. “This was happening at the same time you see this push of Jim Crow laws and the rise of the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan,” Bell says of the advent of the Colorado Chautauqua and speeches like the one given by Aldredge. “And a lot of this kind of ‘re-training’ begins, themes like ‘the lost cause’ [emerge as a way] to remember the Confederate South. And so even though there maybe wasn’t exactly that language at the Chautauqua, I saw enough of it [in my research]. It felt like this coded language, this understanding that these white people in the audience, listening to these speakers, … knew what I
ON THE BILL: Race and Chautauqua — featuring Sarah Bell, historian at the Watkins History Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. 6 p.m. Monday, July 20 via Zoom, chautauqua.com/portfolio/2020annual-meeting-feat-sarah-bell. The event is free.
they were referring to. That’s where I think it’s important to show how Chautauqua participated in these discussions and even promoted these ideas that were occurring elsewhere in society.” The first Chautauqua assembly was founded in New York by Methodist minister John Heyl Vincent and businessman Lewis Miller in 1874 as an outgrowth of a popular outdoor Sunday school class Vincent was already teaching. Vincent and Miller believed the model could help ideas, generally of the progressive variety, grow and spread as people listened to and engaged with lectures and discussions. The concept took off and by 1900 there were around 150 “daughter” Chautauquas modeled off the “mother” program. Lectures were the bread and butter of Chautauquas, focusing on either topics of reform (the push to develop kindergarten in the United States began at Chautauqua assemblies, for example) or inspiration. But the Chautauquas focused primarily on educating and uplifting middle class white Protestants, so much so that Bell says black and Jewish Chautauquas eventually popped up in places like Durham, North Carolina, where the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua later became North Carolina BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
