Washington’s emphasis on hygiene throughout his autobiography indicates his shared understanding with Bacon and Armstrong that the goal of an industrial education should be the figurative “whitening” of the school’s Black students, both morally and socially.
Nonetheless, Bacon’s letter also makes it clear that she considers it regrettable if progress were achieved at the expense of Negro cultural heritage. Hampton officials’ belief in African Americans’ cultural assimilability was progressive for its time, but Bacon understood that it might not be completely positive to the future development of the race if the consequence of assimilation was the loss of identity. Bacon’s hesitation at the idea of fully erasing Negro cultural heritage even as Black communities modernized becomes more palpable when we consider the statements of HFS’s Black membership. Their reflections on their relation to the uplift work in which they engaged points to issues that are both complex and fascinating.
Their letters and essays emphasize in part the connection between educators and their not so distant past, between teachers and their illiterate, less acculturated pupils. HFS members, like other students, faculty, and graduates of the school were committed to a project of racial uplift that strove to address economic and racial inequality. Rather than framing their descriptions of their “less civilized” peers in terms of class, they did so in terms of culture (Baker, “Research” 51).12 And as a consequence, their shared definitions of social mobility exerted a pressure on cultural formations, resulting in the stigmatization of traits typically associated with African or African American communities. Baker writes that in this earlier period:
Uncivilized Blacks were the ones who believed in conjure doctors, told the animal stories, sang the work songs, and gyrated their bodies in the ring shouts and jook joints. They were also the field hands, manual laborers, domestics, and washer women who never had the opportunity to attend one of the normal schools in which strict discipline and obsession with proper behavior convinced students they had become civilized. And it was the uneducated and less refined souls who were held responsible for the vice, promiscuity, and debauchery associated with all black Americans. Moreover, many Negro elites found the main culprit of their neighbors’ cultural degradation in African cultural patterns. (“Research” 52)
Nonetheless, despite the potency of the Hampton Ideology, which emphasized racial “cleansing,” its folklorists retained a sense of connection to the traditions their teachers encouraged them to leave behind in pursuit of mainstream notions of progress. For example, Daniel Webster Davis wrote in a correspondence to Robert Russa Moton (both were elected officers of the organization, and Moton went on to succeed Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee) that he found folk games such as ring plays to be “sweet” and “fair” like a dream. He also described taking pleasure in the memory of participating in these games. Waters argues that equating “expressions of Negro folklore” with a dream underscores the strangeness of these traditions to the “normal conscious activity of proper black educators or, more generally, of properly educated black people.” Yet he also astutely notes that the educators’ expressions of sympathy and memory “emphasized the broad continuities between unlettered folk and educators” (Waters 50).13
Some African American members and supporters of the society emphasized more than disdain, ambivalence, or nostalgia in the researcher’s approach to the collection of Negro folklore. Educator Alexander Crummel, for example, cautioned HFS members to “offer a positive and not a negative interpretation of their African heritage” (Baker, “Research” 57). And activist and writer Anna Julia Cooper cautioned society members not to lose sight of their people’s genius in the face of what must have seemed to be an “overpowering” model of civilization. Cooper warned against a definition of achievement and success that would compel the Negro to accept the notion that “Anglo Saxon ideas, Anglo Saxon standards, Anglo Saxon art, [etc.] must be to him the measure of perfection,” and reminded her audience that “the American Negro cannot produce an original utterance until he realizes the sanctity of his homely inheritance.”14 These statements, resonating with cultural pride, clearly anticipate the thinking of New Negro intellectuals who would follow a generation later.
Hampton Folklore Society scholars thought deeply about the value of African American folklore and their work as collectors, and they also considered the uses to which that work would be put. In fact, the group’s origins were based on an article linking science and the study of race, published in The Atlantic Monthly by Nathaniel Shaler, a Harvard professor of paleontology and geology. Despite the intrinsic racism of Shaler’s essay, “Science and the African Problem” (1890), it suggested to Alice Bacon the idea of starting a society of folklorists. Shaler argued that the transplantation of Africans to the New World constituted “a most remarkable experiment,” which offered the opportunity to study the “improvability of the lower races of mankind” (cited in Waters 10). He proposed that a systematic study of Negro “improvability” be taken from three methods of inquiry: one, a historical investigation that would examine the slave trade to ascertain the African origins of slaves; two, an anthropological study to assess the physical and mental characteristics of Blacks in the United States and to compare those traits to those of Africans; and three, a study of “the social and civic quality of the race” to determine how to secure its advancement (Waters 10–11). Although Shaler accepted many of the crudest stereotypes of the African American character (he believed, for example that Blacks were promiscuous, were naturally rhythmic, and were in need of supervision), he did believe that Whites’ assumptions about Black folk were formed in “the midst of a great darkness” and scientific inquiry was necessary for their enlightenment (Waters 12). The Hampton folklorists, recognizing the severity of America’s race problems, must have desired to participate in an organized, collective scientific inquiry of these issues (Waters 12). At the same time, the Society departed from Shaler’s belief in genetically based racial difference by embracing the Hampton ethos of environmentalism, which argued that Blacks had an innate capacity for social and intellectual improvement.15
Like participants in the related disciplines of anthropology and sociology, by this time in the 1890s, folklorists viewed themselves as participating in a “scientific” endeavor, and they considered their professionalism evident in the objectivity and thoroughness of their studies. In underscoring the precision of folklore collection as science, Hampton folklorists were indebted to the influence of William Wells Newell, Franz Boas, and their colleagues who founded the American Folklore Society (AFLS) in 1888.16 The founders of the AFLS sought to describe the concept of folklore with a precision that it had lacked up to this point. Its founders considered the then popular definition of folklore—“a particular kind of mental and cultural expression with its ‘own set of facts’” —to be unnecessarily vague. So they shifted definitions of and added nuance to the term by having it refer to “oral transmission and its traditional, or conventional character” (Waters 23–25). Newell also insisted on the importance of methodological rigor in the study of folklore. He recognized that folklore needed to be written down in order for it to be studied systematically, but he also considered it essential that the collector refrain from adding to, “adorning” to render more literary, or otherwise tampering with the “evidence” (Waters 27). Newell argued that folklore was entirely different from literature although both made use of figurative devices. Where literature was “systematic” in its application of such devices, folklore used them as a matter of convention and not aesthetic judgment. Newell concluded that the addition of aesthetic principles to conventional materials was the equivalent of falsifying the material; it would fundamentally change the data. “Folklore, in other words, is a separate and independent subject, not a subset of literature” (Waters 28). The AFLS founders established folklore’s suitability for scientific inquiry by locating it under the rubric of anthropology as part of culture, namely the oral tradition. They considered any similarities between literature and folklore to be coincidental, occurring merely because both are modes of communication.17
Boas and Newell rejected evolutionary ideas of racial and cultural development, as did Armstrong, Bacon, and the other Hamptonites. Instead, they focused on analyses of the historical,
