Day 55. The Problem of Hampton

I really enjoyed discovering the folklore materials in Hampton Institute's Southern Workman was collected and re-published by Donald Waters, and I've already included 35 of those stories in my HAX Story Folder. So it was a shock to learn thanks to this thread from Azie Dungey at Twitter about the deplorable history of Hampton's role in Native American history, see the whole thread for more details:

I then founds this useful page with more information: Divide and Conquer: The "Indian Experiment" at Hampton Institute. I need to keep reminding myself to take nothing, nothing, for granted, and to always be trying to learn more about the sources of the stories I am working with. There is violence and crime ... "legal" crime ... at the heart of all of this.

Armstrong's dual mission at Hampton quickly became clear--"uplift" the Negro from his state of degradation; "civilize" the savage and teach him how to work. Members of both races would be taught to dress, speak, work, behave as whites-- despite the fact that they were offered no guarantee that they would ever be offered powers and privileges equivalent to those enjoyed by whites.

In practice, this was to prove a difficult balancing act. The first group of Native Americans who arrived at Hampton on April 14, 1878, were not the relatively acculturated descendants of the Algonquin, Iroquois, and Sioux communities which inhabited Virginia during colonial days. They were defeated Plains warriors--Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, and Arapahos, most of whom barely spoke English--who'd been held as prisoners of war in St. Augustine, FL. In order to make his experiment succeed, Armstrong needed to secure the cooperation of both African- and Native American students. The approach that he developed over time we might call "divide and conquer."