focused on literacy skills. Freedmen’s Bureau Schools in the county included Union Institute, Bladensburg; Marlboro Seminary, Upper Marlboro; Woodville School, Aquasco; Meadows School (near Forestville); St. Thomas School, Baden; Oxon Hill School; Lower Piscataway, Accokeek; Croom School, Nottingham; Chapel Hill School; Clinton/Robeystown, Laurel, T.B. and Muirkirk.2 Establishing and maintaining the schools provided an important vehicle for African-American leadership and community organization, nurturing skills that would sustain the population in the future. Prince George’s County took over the Colored Schools when the Freedmen’s Bureau disbanded in 1872. Schools were built by the county for blacks, but often parents had to provide some of their own money to put up a decent building and keep it maintained. Usually a community petitioned the school board for a school and the board had to decide if there was money, whether there would be enough students, and where it would be located. In a pattern often found in declining rural areas, the schools received little support from the county government. In 1895, Prince George’s was one of five Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington at Maryland counties that made no contribution to colored schools Tuskeegee Institute, February 22, 1915. from county funds. Because of proximity to Washington, D.C., African-Americans in the county enrolled their children in the Washington, D.C., Colored School system, utilizing trolley lines for transportation. Finally in 1921, when a new high school for whites opened in Upper Marlboro, the previous building was repurposed as a secondary school for blacks.
I
ndustrial education provided an alternative means of gaining skills formerly learned through apprenticeship. Prior to the Civil War, Negro mass meetings, known as conventions, and militant abolitionists supported industrial education as a strategy for economic self-help. Former Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who founded the Hampton Institute in 1868, was an articulate proponent of this system. Armstrong, who had commanded black troops and who had served as superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, viewed industrial education as a moral force that would endow African-Americans with Yankee virtues. He also recognized the possibilities it offered as a basis for agreement among northern and southern whites as well as black leaders.
The concept and purpose of industrial education has always been subject to varying interpretations. It was both a pedagogical technique for teaching the mind how to treat specific objects, and a moral force that established character traits such as thrift, morality, and respect for labor. The paradox plaguing industrial education was that it could be viewed as a tool to reconcile labor to a subordinate position, while at the same time serving as a strategy for laborers to better themselves.
2
Several of these schools were known under other names. The most common name for the school or the school’s geographic location appears in this list.
EDUCATION African-American Historic and Cultural Resources
25