... having been breathed out

African Americans and their allies tried to create their own opportunities [in the wake of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery] by establishing dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late 1860s. Antiracist educators and philanthropists who viewed southern Black students as intellectually equal to White students were almost certainly involved, but they were not nearly as numerous or as powerful as the assimilationist educators and philanthropists. These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs "to educate... a number of blacks," and then "send them forth to regenerate" their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England's Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed "white teachers" to be "the best," as claimed in the New York National Freedman's Relief Association in its 1865-1866 annual report. HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the "high culture" of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of "refined," often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily "unrefined" Black.

Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans "had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism," the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedman's Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks' working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools.

For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial. The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White circles.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

I didn't know this about the color bar at historically Black colleges. My ignorance is slightly surprising to me since the single required-reading novel for all first-years at my own college was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the first section of which takes place at an all-Black college modelled on Booker T. Washington's Hampton-style skilled trades school The Tuskeegee Institute. As the narrator's lightness comes up elsewhere in the book (such as when a White woman in the Communist group who recruits him whispers to her fellow Party member that she wishes he were darker and therefore more of a "real Negro" to suit their tokenist agenda), I'm a little bit surprised it didn't come up with regard to his school, either in the text itself or in class discussions. (That I remember, anyway. It's been a while since college.)

Now I'm thinking about other depictions of post-Civil War higher education for Black people. What precisely does the prospect of Oberlin mean, for example, when Denver is studying to get in there in Toni Morrison's Beloved? Just based on its current curriculum I assume that Oberlin leaned toward the classical/Greco-Roman model; I know it began as a Whites-only college and only admitted Blacks later (but still pre-Civil War: Wikipedia says 1835). I don't know if it was one of the universities with a color bar in place, but if the dominant ideology was assimilationist (Black students who studied the Classics were, in the minds of those espousing this rhetoric, supposedly aspiring to "turn themselves White"), it does sort of underline the isolation from her community of origin that's being proposed to Denver, when she's encouraged to study for entrance there. Which in turn plays interestingly with how isolated Denver has historically been WITHIN that community (for most of the book she's essentially housebound due to ostracism), and the way the resolution she finally manages to achieve, happens as a result of reaching out & connecting.