works of art or displays of intellect.3 Moreover, the idea of culture as a “complex whole” would eventually lead the way to the cultural relativism proposed by Franz Boas in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Even as evolutionary ideas about race were gaining prominence, by 1880 another group of scientists was developing yet another theory of racial formation. This group, the environmentalists, argued for the influence of historical, geographic, and social factors in determining racial patterns and cultural behaviors. A generation after the abolition of slavery, African Americans were considered to be a national problem, and while the environmentalists might have shared with evolutionists the idea that Black communities fostered severe pathologies, they differed from them in that they considered their weaknesses to be caused by environmental factors.4
As these theories were being debated, anthropology was transformed from a field populated by individuals interested in natural history but trained in other fields such as medicine to, by the 1880s, a professionalized discipline with the standard characteristics of a specialized field, such as a national organization, a professional journal, and an institutional base in universities and museums. The 1880s saw a number of important developments in the history of modern anthropology, from the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline, the popularization of anthropological ideas on race at Worlds Fairs, the entry of Franz Boas—who would become a major shaping force in the discipline within the next twenty years—into the field as an assistant to Francis Ward Putnam, and the introduction of African Americans, for the first time in significant numbers, working as ethnologists and folklorists.
These changes coincided with, and indeed facilitated, the formation of an organization dedicated to the collection and study of folklore at the Hampton Normal Institute, an industrial school for Blacks founded after the end of the Civil War to help rehabilitate former slaves and prepare them for the new societal and civic roles they were on the cusp of assuming. An examination of the Hampton Folklore Society (HFS) will give us a glimpse into the uses to which the environmentalists were putting their work, and it will also anticipate some of the goals and complications faced by Black ethnologists, who, in the 1920s, formed the next significant body of African American individuals loosely organized around their mutual interest in collecting and representing African American folk culture.
The Hampton Idea of Folklore Collection
The Hampton Institute, founded in 1868 in Virginia by the American Missionary Society, was designed to educate the state’s population of newly emancipated slaves. Its founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, anticipated that Hampton students would fan across the South to teach the members of their communities still mired in the legacy of slavery, manual skills, and rudimentary letters in order to render them useful members of Southern society. The “Hampton Idea,” first articulated by Armstrong and later popularized by Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington, who went on to found Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and become a national spokesman for the race, was that an industrial education would elevate the station of Blacks by giving them the manual skills and the moral character that would make them fit for civil society. Armstrong faulted slavery and its negative effects rather than any inherent inferiority in African Americans for the moral, intellectual, and political inadequacies he identified in their communities. Understanding the word “industry” to mean broadly “diligence in the pursuit of a goal” and more narrowly to mean “the application of manual skills in the production of some agricultural or mechanical object,” he considered the school’s emphasis on an industrial education in preference of schooling in a classical education the key to saving Black people from the primitive conditions in which slavery and impoverishment kept them mired.5
It was under this premise that Alice Bacon, a Hampton teacher, founded the Hampton Folklore Society (HFS) in 1893. The society, whose members were composed of students, alumni, and some teachers, worked until they disbanded six years later to collect data gathered from the communities in which they lived and worked.6 Students brought with them to the Hampton campus knowledge of folklore from their Southern homes. Non-resident members of the Society (many, but not all, of them Institute graduates), known as “correspondents,” often worked as teachers in other parts of the South (for example, South Carolina, Florida and Alabama), and probably obtained folklore from their own students (Waters 8). The organizational efforts of the Hampton Folklore Society were new and untested, for folklore groups were just beginning to be organized in the 1890s. The group’s emphasis on scholarly presentation and scientific investigation departed from prior methods because up to that point individuals interested in African American folklore, like Joel Chandler Harris, moved between “disciplined presentation of data and literary adornment of it” (Waters 37). HFS members understood folklore to be the repository of cultural memory and communal values, and yet they worked within an institution that saw little value in African American culture if it deviated from hegemonic norms that were associated with progress.7 The question arises, then, what did the HFS members have in mind when they went out to collect folklore?
Hampton’s commitment to putting its students on the road to economic and social progress compelled them to choose from several options vis-à-vis their relation to folk culture and communities. They could express an uncritical belief in folklore (a perspective which was discouraged by their instructors and benefactors); they could disavow Black folk traditions as backward and see themselves bringing progress and civilization to their people; or they could choose, as Donald Waters maintains members of the Hampton society did, to commit themselves to protecting Black folklore from contempt and ridicule by submitting it to careful and respectful study and presentation (Waters 46–47).
The second choice—the idea of racial uplift through cultural assimilation—proved equally compelling according to Lee Baker, who stresses that the founders and members of the Hampton Folklore society saw their attempts to record the cultural practices of rural Blacks as a contribution to the larger institution’s mission. They could show that industrial education accomplished its goal of “fostering the so-called Christian civilization of its graduates,” he argues, by using folklore to underscore how much of these people’s African traditions remained entrenched and in need of uprooting.8 Certainly Bacon aspired to have HFS members bridge and show the divide between their own literate, upwardly mobile existences and the illiterate and impoverished lives of most Black folk. But the Hampton community’s shared goal of closing that gap was deeply invested in removing any remaining traces of African heritage and African American slave culture.9
Armstrong and Bacon’s goals were virtually indistinguishable, with the exception of Bacon adding an interest in historical preservation to Armstrong’s “civilizing mission” (Baker, “Research” 55). Bacon’s interest in conservation and her belief in modernity’s inevitable advancement is evident in an 1893 letter she circulated to Hampton graduates and interested parties:
The American Negroes are rising so rapidly from the condition of ignorance and poverty in which slavery left them, to a position among the cultivated and civilized people of the earth, that the time seems not far distant when they shall have cast off their past entirely, and stand an anomaly among civilized races, as a people having no distinct tradition, beliefs or ideas from which a history of their growth may be traced. If within the next few years care is not taken to collect and preserve all traditions and customs peculiar to the Negroes, there will be little to reward the search of the future historian who would trace the history of the African continent through the years of slavery to the position which they will hold a few generations hence.10
Bacon imagined progress for the Negro to be synonymous not only with economic upward mobility but also with assimilation to Euro-American cultural norms. Many adherents to the Hampton philosophy associated backwardness and primitivity with any traits that deviated from a White social norm, as well as with anything identified or identifiable as African in origins. Blackness and impurity are linked in the minds of Booker T. Washington’s readers when he provocatively declared that his most pressing aspiration as a teacher was to introduce Tuskegee students to the uses of a toothbrush
