RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION

Recruitment and Retention of African American Students

Recruitment and Retention of African American Students

The history of African Americans in America is primarily that of a work history. The Africans were brought to this country for use in labor. According to Spivey (1978), the death of the formal institution of slavery did not end that relationship. To avoid confusing the reader with all of the terminology that has evolved to describe technology education, the writer will use the term industrial education throughout the historical background. Industrial education is a generic term including all educational activities concerned with modern industry and crafts, their raw materials, products, machines, personnel and problems (Gregg, 1929). It therefore includes industrial arts, manual training, and vocational industrial education.

As history reveals, working with the hands has been a long-time symbol of industrial training, and has been a significant part of the culture African American people since coming to America. After being taken from their homeland and brought to America, African Americans were wrongfully enslaved. But, because of their many industrial skills, slavery became a flourishing economic institution. Therefore, according to Hall (1973), from the very beginning of their stay in this country, they have been involved in some type of training program learning the skills necessary for survival in a foreign culture which was forced upon them.

During the 1800s, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, and also the ideological father of African American industrial education, tried to address the race problem which was concerned with the social and economic relations of the newly freed men, women, and children to the rest of the white South (which fought not to them). General Armstrong believed that African Americans should be taught to remain in their places, stay out of politics, keep quiet about their rights, and work hard. This educational theme that he emphasized was the need for African Americans to be good, subservient laborers (Spivey, 1978).

The comprehensiveness of his plan for Hampton Institute was quite obvious as revealed in one of his writings:

The thing to be done was clear: to train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people, first by example, by getting land and homes; to give them not the dollar that they could earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor, to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands, and to those ends to build up an industrial system for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character. (Bennett, 1924, p. 244)

Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute (Hampton University) came into being April 1, 1868, with General Armstrong as its principal, one matron and 15 boarding pupils. By April 26th, the number of pupils had doubled and the school continued to grow during this period.

Booker T. Washington, who was General Armstrongs prize student, took on the same values and philosophical views as his former mentor. These philosophical views of uplift through submission drew heated criticism from many African American ...