Hampton University
Hampton University is a private, historically black, research university in Hampton, Virginia, United States. Founded in 1868 as Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, it was established by Black and White leaders of the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War to provide education to freedmen. The campus houses the Hampton University Museum, which is the oldest museum of the African diaspora in the United States and the oldest museum in the commonwealth of Virginia. First led by former Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Hampton University's main campus is located on in Hampton, Virginia, on the banks of the Hampton River.
The university offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs. The university has a satellite campus in Virginia Beach and also has online offerings. Hampton University is home to 16 research centers, including the Hampton University Proton Therapy Institute, the largest free-standing facility of its kind in the world. Hampton University is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
History
The campus was founded on the grounds of "Little Scotland", a former plantation in Elizabeth City County that is located on the Hampton River. It overlooked Hampton Roads and was not far from Fortress Monroe and the Grand Contraband Camp, that gathered formerly enslaved men and women who sought refuge with Union forces in the South during the first year of the war. Their facilities represented freedom.In 1861 the American Missionary Association responded to the former slaves' need for education and hired Mary Smith Peake as its first teacher at the camp. She had already secretly been teaching slaves and free Black people in the area despite the state's legal prohibition. She first taught for the AMA on September 17, 1861, and was said to gather her pupils under a large oak. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation was read here—the first place in the Confederate states. From then on the big tree was called the Emancipation Oak. The tree, now a symbol of both the university and of the city, survives as part of the designated National Historic Landmark District at Hampton University.
The Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, later called the Hampton Institute, was founded in 1868 after the war by the biracial leadership of the American Missionary Association, who were chiefly Congregational and Presbyterian ministers. It was first led by former Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Among the school's famous alumni is Booker T. Washington, an educator who was hired as the first principal at the Tuskegee Institute, which he developed for decades.
Civil War
During the American Civil War, Union-held Fortress Monroe in southeastern Virginia at the mouth of Hampton Roads became a gathering point and safe haven of sorts for fugitive slaves. The commander, General Benjamin F. Butler, determined they were "contraband of war", to protect them from being returned to slaveholders, who clamored to reclaim them. As numerous individuals sought freedom behind Union lines, the Army arranged for the construction of the Grand Contraband Camp nearby, from materials reclaimed from the ruins of Hampton, which had been burned by the retreating Confederate Army. This area was later called "Slabtown".Hampton University traces its roots to Mary S. Peake, who began in 1861 with outdoor classes for freedmen, whom she taught under what is now the landmark Emancipation Oak in the nearby area of Elizabeth City County. In 1863 the newly issued Emancipation Proclamation was read to a gathering under the historic tree there.
After the War: teaching teachers
After the War, a normal school was formalized in 1868, with former Union brevet Brigadier General Samuel C. Armstrong as its first principal. The new school was established on the grounds of a former plantation named "Little Scotland", which had a view of Hampton Roads. The original school buildings fronted the Hampton River. Legally chartered in 1870 as a land grant school, it was first known as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute.Typical of historically black colleges, Hampton received much of its financial support in the years following the Civil War from the American Missionary Association, other church groups, and former officers and soldiers of the Union Army. One of the many Civil War veterans who gave substantial sums to the school was General William Jackson Palmer, a Union cavalry commander from Philadelphia. He later built the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, and founded Colorado Springs, Colorado. As the Civil War began in 1861, although his Quaker upbringing made Palmer abhor violence, his passion to see the slaves freed compelled him to enter the war. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery in 1894.
In 1872 Thomas P. Fenner was hired by Armstrong to create and lead the Hampton Singers in response to the tremendous financial success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers 1871 concert tour. Armstrong hoped that a similar choir at Hampton could also raise money for the financially struggling school. Fenner and the choir toured widely and were able to raise enough money through concerts to pay for the construction of Virginia Hall, the first dormitory for women at the Hampton Institute. Further funds raised by the choir in the 1870s were responsible for stabilizing the school's finances overall and prevented the school from closing.
Unlike the wealthy Palmer, Sam Armstrong was the son of a missionary to the Sandwich Islands. He also had dreams for the betterment of the freedmen. He patterned his new school after the model of his father, who had overseen the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic to the Polynesians. He wanted to teach the skills necessary for blacks to be self-supporting in the impoverished South. Under his guidance, a Hampton-style education became well known as an education that combined cultural uplift with moral and manual training. Armstrong said it was an education that encompassed "the head, the heart, and the hands".
At the close of its first decade, the school reported a total admission in those ten years of 927 students, with 277 graduates, all but 17 of whom had become teachers. Many of them had bought land and established themselves in homes; many were farming as well as teaching; some had gone into business. Only a very small proportion failed to do well. By another 10 years, there had been over 600 graduates. In 1888, of the 537 still alive, three-fourths were teaching, and about half as many undergraduates were also teaching. It was estimated that 15,000 children in community schools were being taught by Hampton's students and alumni that year.
After Armstrong's death, Hampton's leaders continued to develop a highly successful external relations program that forged a network of devoted supporters. By 1900, Hampton was the wealthiest school serving African Americans, largely due to its success in development and fundraising.
Hampton also had the only library school in the United States for educating black librarians. The Hampton Institute Library School opened in 1925 and through its Negro Teacher-Librarian Program trained and issued professional degrees to 183 black librarians. The library school closed in 1939.
Booker T. Washington: spreading the educational work
Among Hampton's earliest students was Booker T. Washington, who arrived from West Virginia in 1872 at the age of 16. He worked his way through Hampton, and then went on to attend Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. After graduation, he returned to Hampton and became a teacher. Upon Armstrong's recommendation to the founder of a small school in Tuskegee, Alabama, established six years before, in 1881 the 25-year-old Washington went there to strengthen it and develop it to the status of a normal school, one recognized as being able to produce qualified teachers.This new institution eventually became Tuskegee University. Embracing much of Armstrong's philosophy, Washington built Tuskegee into a substantial school and became nationally famous as an educator, orator, and fund-raiser as well. He collaborated with the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in the early 20th century to create a model for rural black schools; Rosenwald established a fund that matched monies raised by communities to build more than 5,000 schools for rural black children, mostly in the South. In 1888 Washington recruited his Hampton classmate Charles W. Greene to Tuskegee to lead the Agriculture Department. Together they enticed George Washington Carver to the Tuskegee Agriculture faculty upon his graduation with a master's degree from Iowa State University in 1896.
Carver provided such technical strength in agriculture that, in 1900, Washington assigned Greene to establish a demonstration of black business capability and economic independence off-campus in Tuskegee. This project, entirely black-owned, comprised 4,000 lots of real estate and was formally established and designated Greenwood in 1901, as a demonstration for black-owned business and residential districts in every city in the nation with a significant black population. After Washington visited Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1905 and addressed a large gathering there, the Oklahomans followed the Tuskegee model and named Tulsa's black-owned and operated district "Greenwood" in 1906.
Native Americans
In 1878, Hampton established a formal education program for Native Americans to accommodate men who had been held as prisoners of war. In 1875 at the end of the American Indian Wars, the United States Army sent seventy-two warriors from the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche and Caddo Nations, to imprisonment and exile in St. Augustine, Florida. Essentially they were used as hostages to persuade their peoples in the West to keep peace. Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt supervised them at Fort Marion and began to arrange for their education in the English language and American culture.St. Augustine was attracting numerous visitors from the North as it became known as a winter resort. Many became interested in the Native Americans held at Fort Marion and volunteered as teachers. They also provided the men with art supplies. Some of the men created what is now known as ledger art in this period. Some of the resulting works are held by the Smithsonian Institution.
At the end of the warriors' incarceration, Pratt convinced seventeen of the younger men to enroll at Hampton Institute for additional education. He also recruited additional Native American students: a total of seventy Native Americans, young men and women from various tribes, mostly from the Plains rather than the acculturated tribes of Virginia, joined that first class. Because Virginia's First Families sometimes boasted of their Native American heritage through Pocahontas, some supporters hoped that the Native American students would help locals to accept the institute's black students. The black students were also supposed to help "civilize" the Native American students to current American society, and the Native Americans to "uplift the Negro".
The Red Moon was a theatrical show featuring a fictionalized version of the school.
In 1923, in the face of growing controversy over racial mingling, after the former Confederate states had disenfranchised blacks and imposed Jim Crow, the Native American program ended. Native Americans stopped sending their boys to the school after some employers fired Native American men because they had been educated with blacks. The program's final director resigned because she could not prevent "amalgamation" between the Native American girls and black boys.