by Lacey M. Guest, Master’s Student, Department of History, and Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
In 1950 Joseph Himes, a sociologist at North Carolina College (NCC), described college education as the “touchstone of magic and power” for black students. “Knowledge is power,” he wrote, “and college degrees are the symbol of knowledge and the key to power.”1 Many black intellectuals before and after Himes have agreed with this claim, but exactly what a college education consisted of has often been at the center of debates about black higher education. Only fifteen years after Himes’s declaration about the importance of a college degree, black students in universities across the country struggled to implement programs which reflected the experiences and knowledges of black students and their communities. The Black Studies Movement took center stage in the debates about black higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the previous two decades, marriage education laid the foundation for the institutionalization of black knowledge.
Black marriage education in the postwar years preceded the creation of Black Studies programs by reshaping a specific educational initiative to reflect the marital and familial experiences of black citizens. In the years surrounding WWII, marriage education was a central feature of black higher education in the American South.2 Aspiring to provide functional information to students about married life, these courses included topics such as partner choice, family finances, sexual adjustment, child rearing, and problems of heredity. Courses in Southern historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) also consistently provided information about accessible birth control, women’s careers as wives and breadwinners, and the role of racism in shaping the personal experiences and choices of African Americans. HBCUs in the South fashioned marriage education into a useful and relevant tool for black students by including information that attended to the impact of systemic racism on the black experience in the South. Black marriage education also employed a community-oriented approach which democratized access to information for the advancement of communities and individuals.
In the years surrounding World War II, marriage educators and experts emphasized the importance of democracy in the home. Ideal modern American marriage featured an egalitarian partnership between equals and conceptualized the family as the center of democracy. In 1944, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier recognized the social changes WWII had created. He anticipated a more integrated postwar society which would expand African American access to rights of citizenship in many ways. He urged HBCUs to prepare black students for this changing postwar society.3 Marriage education provided black students with the tools they needed to navigate one facet of postwar life—the changing expectations of modern American marriage and family life. Marriage, partner choice, reproductive choice, and education coalesced in marriage education efforts and provided Southern black students with a guide to accessing rights of American citizenship—rights of personal choice which were unavailable in slavery and severely restricted under Jim Crow.
Himes suggested that “race affects every phase of life for the Negro college student.”4 This was particularly true in the South, he wrote, “where segregation, discrimination, and symbolic inferiority have been institutionalized in the regional way of life.”5 Many marriage educators kept this in mind as they created their marriage curriculums. In 1959, sociology professor at Virginia State University, Harry Roberts planned a family life conference for the Petersburg community, which took into consideration several factors. The conference explicitly addressed the impact of racism on marriage and family life by stating that “because of the status of the Negro people in this country, [sic] problems have been intensified for Negro families.”6 The conference featured a program for the public, as well as for students at four local high schools, thus making the information widely available to the Petersburg community. By centering the particular experiences of African Americans in America’s Jim Crow South, marriage educators molded their courses and programs to be more relevant to local black communities. Including discussions of black families and the impact of racism on the private realm of marriage and family life allowed educators to reshape the modern American expectations of democratic marriage and family life for a wider audience of Americans.
Marriage educators worked with local organizations to make marriage education widely available. The 1945 marriage conference at NCC was open to the public and hosted a roundtable discussion which asserted community responsibility for shaping and maintaining healthy marriages and families. Participants expressed concern for the children of families in which both parents were compelled by economic necessity to work outside the home. They discussed the role of community organizations such as parent-teacher associations, churches, schools, and civic organizations in assisting members of the community.7 These organizations shouldered the responsibility for facilitating economic security, compulsory education, adequate space and housing, sex education, and preventative medical care. The frequent attendance of community members at marriage education programs in the South demonstrates a commitment to incorporating modern marriage in black communities and a receptive audience of black citizens ready to organize at the grassroots level to work toward full civic participation.
Marriage educators harnessed marriage education to prepare black citizens for integrated postwar life in which increased access to American citizenship was possible. By including information that attended to the black experience under Jim Crow and making marriage education available to local communities, black citizens in the South reshaped and restructured marriage education to fit their specific needs. In this way, members of black communities asserted the legitimacy of their experiences and challenged the system which constructed them. These efforts should be seen as part of the longer narrative of black education, activism on college campuses, and black community development. Marriage education helped to make Southern HBCU campuses fertile ground for assertions of citizenship and laid the foundations of postwar civil rights activism.
Marriage education also provided spaces in which students reflected on scholarship that applied directly to their personal experiences, lives, and identities. In this way, marriage education in Southern HBCUs preceded the widespread advent of Black Studies programs which catered to the changing needs of black students and communities in later decades. Advocates of Black Studies demanded curriculums which acknowledged the legitimacy of black knowledge, challenged structural inequality, and provided an intellectual community of black scholars.8 However, this movement did not end in victory in the 1970s. Black college students today continue to fight for access to programs and services which center black history, activism, and knowledge. Himes’s assertion that “knowledge is power” for black college students failed to specify what knowledge was powerful. Black students have since specified and made repeated demands for universities to include and value black knowledge through the institutionalization of Black Studies programs. Many students are still waiting for these programs.
—Lacey M. Guest is a master's student in the Departments of History and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research focus is twentieth century U. S. history with an emphasis on the history of gender and sexuality, history of education, and African-American history. Her research chronicles the history of marriage education in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s.
End Notes
1. Joseph S. Himes, Jr. and A. E. Manly, “The Success of Students in a Negro Liberal Arts College,” The Journal of Negro Education 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1950): 466.
2. The schools included in this study are as follows: Howard University, Hampton University, Virginia State University, Fisk University, Bennett College, Shaw University, St. Augustine’s University, Fayetteville State University, North Carolina Central University, South Carolina State University, Voorhees College, Savannah State College, Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clarke Atlanta University. I found evidence of the implementation of a college marriage course in approximately half of these institutions which mirrors exactly the statistics gathered by Henry Bowman in 1949. His study indicated that by 1949, approximately half of the accredited institutions of higher learning in the country offered marriage courses.
3. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Role of Negro Schools in the Postwar World,” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1944): 473, 467.
4. Joseph S. Himes, “Some Fringe Problems of Teaching Marriage in Negro Colleges,” Marriage and Family Living 15, no. 2 (May 1953): 115.
5. Himes, “Fringe Problems,” 115.
6. Harry Roberts, “Proposal for Family Life Conference,” Harry Walter Roberts Papers, Box 23, Folder 4. Special Collections and Archives, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University, Petersburg, VA.
7. “Report of the Fourth Annual Conference Conservation of Marriage and the Family,” 6. Vertical File - NCCU-Conference-Marriage and the Family, North Carolina Central University, James E. Shepard Library, Archives and Special Collections, Durham, North Carolina.
8. Ibram H. Rogers, “The Black Campus Movement and the Institutionalization of Black Studies, 1965-1970,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 1 (March 2012): 21-40.