By Allison Perrine
RED BANK – Racial disparities and educational programs were the topics of the night last Wednesday during the Red Bank Public Library’s most recent installment of its virtual program, Let’s Talk About Race (LTAR).
At least 70 attendees registered for the program that night to hear from guest speakers Walter Greason, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of Educational Leadership at Monmouth University and president of the T. Thomas Fortune Foundation, and Connie Goddard, Ph.D., local historian and Tinton Falls resident. The two focused on racial disparities in schooling and explained what everyone can learn from industrial education – an approach to teach traditional subjects like math or science in contexts of design and development – especially within the Bordentown school in New Jersey.
Greason kicked off the night with a discussion of the historical oversights in the systems of segregation in the U.S. and globally. As a graduate student, he said almost all of the histories that were “widely circulating” focused on World War II and the Civil War, with a small sub-section of the American Revolution. He added that social and cultural histories of African Americans were really only touched on with two dominant topics: slavery and the Civil Rights Movement.
“There’s this just vast terrain that I knew there were documents, I knew there was evidence, but no one had really pulled it together in an organized way to grapple with segregation,” said Greason. “We never tell this story: It’s only been maybe 15 years of really excavating the story of Civil Rights struggle outside of the South. In fact, it’s still considered a cutting-edge topic for new dissertations and new graduate student research.”
Looking to New Jersey specifically, Greason said he feels an understanding of the way segregation evolved in the state can be found by looking at Bordentown, once home to the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth. It was a state-supported boarding school with an all-Black faculty and administration with a mixed academic and industrial curriculum. Deemed the “Tuskegee of the North,” Greason highlighted just how “extraordinarily important” the Bordentown school was for allowing Black Americans to achieve economic stability within Jim Crow segregation.
Goddard, whose mother attended the North Dakota State Normal and Industrial School and was “quite fond” of it, presented an in-depth look at the Bordentown school. Her presentation was based on research she has conducted for her book on manual training and industrial education programs.
As Goddard explained, the Bordentown school was a product of the Progressive Era, which ran from the 1880s to 1920. American society was under “a great deal of change” with social reform and moving from rural to urban societies. Schools began develop- ing “new education,” which made learning more relevant to everyday lives, including learning math through carpentry or chem- istry by cooking. Public schooling was expanding but was limited for Black children.
Around 1900, about 10 to 20 percent of white children were in high school but less than 2 percent were in college; those statistics were both “far less” for Black students.
“There were many parts of the South where there was no such thing, counties where there was no such thing as a high school for Black students, or even much of an elementary school,” said Goddard.
The Bordentown school in New Jersey was founded in 1886 by a group of pastors led by Rev. Walter Rice, who was born a slave. The idea behind the school was to give students “training in particular and useful industries falling to their race,” she said, such as cooking, carpentry, dressmaking and more, while getting “a good English education.” It grew slowly with donations from local churches and had about 50 students.
By 1894, it got attention from the state and was named the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth. By about 1900, tuition was free with manual labor and it had 100-plus students, serving grades six through 10. It continued to grow in recognition and size over the years and by 1928, enrollment was 300 students, it started intramurals and enrichment programs, had music groups and a full secondary program.
“It was really a substantial institution,” said Goddard.
Its heyday was in the 1930s after enrollment grew to 400 and faculty and staff grew to 60. But as time went on, the state began desegregating. Then Gov. Robert B. Meyner said the school “did not offer that much of an education,” she said, and it eventually closed in June 1955.
Programs like these for Black students have been a controversial topic in the past, “but they are seldom discussed in the context of similar programs for white students,” according to the library.
According to Goddard, many Black parents at the time felt segregated schools had “more nurture” and “less hostility,” but there was a notion of what a “Negro job” was and a feeling that schools should prepare students for those.
“That was not popular” with the principal of the school, she said. “The whole idea of making one’s self useful, which was one of the ideas behind manual training schools – that idea was decimated by prejudice and I think that’s something that we really need to all remember,” said Goddard.
This article originally appeared in the Feb. 4 – 10, 2021, print edition of The Two River Times.
