New Negro Messengers in Dixie

Abstract

This essay examines the central roles of Black faculty at historical Black colleges and universities and their radical pedagogical work as major incubators of Black progressive thought in the early twentieth century. Despite pressures to emulate the manual-training curriculum implemented by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Virginia Union University built a progressive faculty deeply committed to supplying Black students with the intellectual training necessary to address global problems of White supremacy and labor exploitation. Black students were self-consciously determined to view their career contributions in terms beyond just scholarly impact, and this chapter illustrates how the larger calling of developing the imaginations of Black students would profoundly shape the development of Black social science literature during the first half of the twentieth century.