Black and White and Color: American Photographs at the Turn of the Century

Early in December, 1899, an energetic, thirty-five-year-old, white woman photographer named Frances Benjamin Johnston started to work on a commission for the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Hampton Institute was originally an industrial arts and teachers training school for former slaves. Somewhat later it began an experiment to matriculate American Indians dispossessed of tribal land. It was founded shortly after the Civil War by the charismatic white reformer, Colonel Samuel Chapman Armstrong, former commander of the 8th and 9th U. S. Colored Troops. Armstrong intended to teach Southern blacks (also American Indians by 1878) “how to educate their own race,” as well as to “provide them with Christian values, and to equip them with agricultural and mechanical skills by which they could support themselves during the months when school was not in session. They were to abjure politics and concentrate on uplifting their race through hard work, thrift, and the acquisition of property.” The school was supported by private Northern philanthropy as well as by government funding, and it enjoyed liberal Quaker support that included the famous abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, in whose consideration the Hampton militia unit was forbidden to drill with real rifles. Hampton opened its doors in 1868 with two white teachers and fifteen black and female students; but by the time of Miss Johnston's arrival thirty-one years later, it had grown to almost 1,000 students, 135 of them Indians, with about 100 faculty and administration members. By 1880 over 10,000 Southern black children were being taught in schools staffed by Hampton graduates; over ninety percent of Hampton's black graduates taught school, although vastly fewer Indians graduatedwith similarly usable credentials, since they returned home to reservations where teaching opportunities for native Americans were scarce.