January 23, 2024: Spelman College & the Education of Black Women in the South
by ELISABETH GRIFFITH
On January 17, a white donor gave Atlanta’s historically Black Spelman College $100 million, the largest-ever single gift to an HBCU. It happened before I began posting on Substack, but I’m focusing on that event, after the fact, to pursue two themes: the impact of education for all women and the possibility and power of interracial alliances.
Spelman’s benefactor was Ronda Stryker, a trustee since 1997, a former special education teacher in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a director of a medical equipment company founded by her grandfather. Billionaires, Stryker and her husband had previously donated $30 million to Spelman and endowed a medical school at their alma mater, Western Michigan University. The pattern of white philanthropists underwriting Black schools began before the Civil War. Supporting the education of Black women was a greater challenge.
Investing in educating any women was unconventional. Despite exceptions like Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren, female illiteracy was common in the colonies and the new country. The Founding Fathers limited voting rights to white, property-owning men, but they believed democracy depended on literate constituents. They called on “Republican Mothers” to instruct their sons and encouraged the creation of public schools. While privileged parents could hire tutors or afford private academies, most mothers were already exhausted by their domestic roles. Nor would they exclude daughters from any limited instruction.
The need for trained teachers led to establishing vocational schools, called “normal schools,” in the North. The South had no public schools until after the Civil War. The reality that school boards could pay women less than male teachers soon opened a sex-segregated occupation for white and Black women. Public schools and female seminaries eventually created a demand by women for greater access to higher education, despite supposedly scientific evidence that if women used their smaller brains they would shrink their ovaries, making them either unmarriageable or hysterical. Remarkably, equal access to colleges and professional schools by women was not achieved until the 1960s. Today, women are the majority of undergraduate and graduate students, and the percentage of Black women earning degrees has outpaced all other racial, ethnic, and gender cohorts.
In the nineteenth century, educating women in the North was a practical rather than a progressive policy, whereas educating any enslaved person prior was illegal and inconceivable before Emancipation. Under post-Civil War Black Codes, it was outlawed in the former Confederacy. A total of seventeen states required segregated schools, excluding Black students from state universities and land grant colleges. Schools in other states used quotas to limit Black applicants. In 1890, the Congress required establishment of separate Black colleges, which prompted creation of more HCBUs. The South abandoned Black education after 1900, refusing to allocate tax appropriations to Black schools.
To address post-war illiteracy, Congress passed the 1866 Public Education Act, to open schools and train teachers in the South. President Andrew Johnson vetoed it. Initially the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, attempted to fill the need. Established in 1865 as a temporary agency to support the formerly enslaved and displaced whites who had been loyal to the union, it provided food, clothing, housing, and education. It built hospitals and established Black schools like Fiske, Howard, and Hampton. Its efforts were undercut by lack of funds and volunteers, as well as the politics of race and Reconstruction. Johnson vetoed a bill to extend its jurisdiction, as an interference with states’ rights. The Bureau was dismantled in 1872.
Nonetheless, hundreds of teachers, principally white and Black women, flocked to the South. Even before the war ended, Charlotte Forten (1837-1914), a prominent Black abolitionist, opened a school in Beaufort, South Carolina, as part of the Port Royal Experiment. After the war, she taught in Charleston and married Francis Grimke, the freed son of Sarah and Angelina’s brother. Sarah Jane Woodson Early (1825-1907) graduated from Oberlin, in Ohio, which was founded by abolitionists in 1833 as the first integrated and coeducational college. She was the first Black woman to become a college instructor, at Wilberforce, an HBCU founded in 1856, where she taught Latin and literature. In 1868 she moved to Hillsboro, North Carolina, to teach at a Freedmen’s school for Black girls.
In 1881, Harriet Giles (1828-1909) and Sophia Packard (1824-1891), two white teachers and “spinster companions” from Worcester, Massachusetts, together with Black ministers, founded Spelman, then the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. The school began in a church basement with eleven, mostly illiterate girls. Within a year, they had 200 students, ages 15 to 52. Aspiring to offer an academic curriculum, they announced courses in algebra, astronomy, botany, chemistry, the Constitution, Latin, political economy, and rhetoric, but white donors preferred to underwrite vocational training.
The school was initially supported by the Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society of New England, well-intentioned Lady Bountifuls. On a fundraising trip to Ohio in 1882, the duo met John D. Rockefeller at a church conference. The founder of Standard Oil visited the school in 1884, when it had 600 Black students and sixteen white faculty members, many of them volunteers. Black churches and community groups helped it take a mortgage on nine acres and five buildings, the remains of a Union encampment. After Rockefeller paid the debt, the school’s name was changed to Spelman Seminary, in honor of his wife, Laura Spelman, and her parents, whose home had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The first new building, Rockefeller Hall, was built in 1889. In 1927, the Sisters Chapel was named for Laura and her sister Lucy.
Despite its ambitions, Spelman began as an elementary school and added a high school, in an era in which there were few secondary schools in the entire South. In addition to preparing teachers, Spelman taught cooking, sewing, housekeeping, and laundering, to educate Black women for marriage and motherhood, or domestic service. In 1886 the Nurse Training Department opened, the first for Black women in the country, followed by the Missionary Department in 1891. Spelman Seminary opened a College Department in 1897, granting its first college degrees in 1901. Most of the collegiate courses were offered at Morehouse, an adjacent men’s college.
Spelman Seminary did not become Spelman College until 1924. Its major donors, board members, and presidents remained white. Most teachers were white spinsters from New England, but the demographics shifted to include Spelman alumnae. By 1937, Black teachers outnumbered whites two-to-one and there were ten men on the faculty. The board eliminated its elementary and nursing departments but kept its high school into the 1930s. The goal was to provide a first-rate education to a smaller number of students.
In 1953, the appointment of a Black man president ended the era of female New England leadership. Naming a second Black man president in 1976 led students to barricade the board room for twenty hours, demanding reconsideration and selection of a Black woman. The board did not back down, but eleven years later, in 1987, named anthropologist Johnnetta Betsch Cole, PhD, Spelman’s seventh president and its first Black female leader in 106 years. She was followed by similarly stellar leaders, including Audrey Forbes Manley, MD, a pediatrician, Spelman’s first alumna president (and the widow of a former president); Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, a psychologist and author of books on racism, including Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (1997); and, since 2022, Helene Gayle, MD, an epidemiologist with over twenty years’ experience at the Center for Disease Control.
Among 107 HBCUs today, only Spelman and Bennett, in Greensboro, North Carolina, are women’s colleges. Bennett also began in a church basement, under the Freedmen’s Bureau, educating boys and girls, becoming a college for women in 1926. Spelman is the oldest, historically Black, private, liberal arts institution for women in the US. Ranked among the top ten women’s colleges, it attracts graduation speakers like Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Its alumnae include Stacey Abrams, Marian Wright Edelman, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, and Alice Walker.
Reflecting on its origins, one wishes that its white founders had overcome ingrained prejudice to form more equal alliances with Black women, and had modeled what more might have been possible, among women working together across the barriers of bias.
Harriet Giles & Sophia Packard (Spelman College Archives, public domain)
Spelman Seminary graduates, 1892 (photo credit: Degregory, below)
Dr. Helene Gayle & Ronda Stryker (photo credit, Spelman College)
SOURCES
Crystal A. Degregory, https://hbcustory.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/saluting-spelman-women-who-serve-since-1881/
Stephanie Y. Evans, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954 (University of Florida Press, 2007).
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (William Morrow, 1984).
Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Jo Moore Stewart, Spelman: A Centennial Celebration, 1881-1981 (Spelman, 1981).
Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother,” Women and the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
“Charlotte Forten Grimke,” https://www.nps.gov/people/charlotte-forten-grimke.htm
“Freedmen’s Bureau,” June 1, 2020, https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedmen’s-bureau
“Spelman College,” https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/education/spelman-college