Pamela E Foster

From 1892 to 1932 hundreds of black families in the U.S. South and beyond sent their young women descendants to Mary Holmes Seminary in Mississippi “to train them first to be home makers, then to be wise leaders in society and the church” (Mary Holmes 1906, 6). Yet, there is little or no discussion in religious studies scholarship that explores these families in relation to the particulars of their chosen Christian higher education institution. To bring this discussion to the fore, the research presented here examines how and with what consequences a black American family headed by formerly enslaved people developed Christianity and its Republican motherhood component at home and at a higher education institution, as reflected in family and school documents. The findings challenge the notions that black women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries benefitted from Christian higher education despite, rather than largely because of, what white missionaries provided, that traditional women’s spheres are lesser spheres, that enslavement constituted moral degradation, and that black Americans’ own behavior has less impact on their lives than does structural racism.

This examination is part of a larger analysis of the underexplored rhetoric of the four million enslaved Americans who stayed at, returned to, or longed to return to their former homes during and after the Civil War, as represented in the works of such black American luminaries as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, and many among the four million themselves. Specifically, this study explores how prolific composer James A. Bland (1854-1911) transforms images of the horrors of slavery into the beauty of God, using in part personalization and the emotional appeal of memories of home, in arguably the most controversial classic country song in American history: his 1878-penned hit “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” The findings suggest that the canon of communication and race theories needs to be broadened to explain how texts and other artifacts of the realities of the formerly enslaved who claim their homes function to connect today’s black audiences with sacred parts of their slave ancestry. The findings also suggest that an authentic plantation-as-home site would well augment for teaching and research purposes the scores of educational, memorial and experiential sites of plantations-as-hell that dominate the American landscape and mindset.

While it generally is acknowledged that historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) from their earliest days in the United States have produced leaders critical to the development of free people, systematic studies of just what students were taught at these schools and how in order to to achieve that leadership effect are rare. “Contextualizing Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Muse for Early Black College Students” is one of those rare looks, showing how Cato: A Tragedy, the classic play by Briton Joseph Addison (1672-1719), functioned at three HBCUs from 1882 to 1912. The examination explores various historical and contemporary interpretations of Cato, including ones sensitive to race and gender marginalization, and finds that, despite the multiple possible meanings of the play and differing views on early black college pedagogy, the contexts of the schools examined and other factors lend themselves to a Christian interpretation of the play’s major themes.

From 1892 to 1932 hundreds of black families in the U.S. South and beyond sent their young women descendants to Mary Holmes Seminary in Mississippi “to train them first to be home makers, then to be wise leaders in society and the church” (Mary Holmes 1906, 6). Yet, there is little or no discussion in religious studies scholarship that explores these families in relation to the particulars of their chosen Christian higher education institution. To bring this discussion to the fore, the research presented here examines how and with what consequences a black American family headed by formerly enslaved people developed Christianity and its Republican motherhood component at home and at a higher education institution, as reflected in family and school documents. The findings challenge the notions that black women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries benefitted from Christian higher education despite, rather than largely because of, what white missionaries provided, that traditional women’s spheres are lesser spheres, that enslavement constituted moral degradation, and that black Americans’ own behavior has less impact on their lives than does structural racism.