Faculty and students at the Hampton Institute
Young describes what it was like to teach at the Hampton Institute in Norfolk, Virginia, following her tenure at Paine College. The Hampton Institute was founded by Congregationists from the North and Young recalls that when she taught there from 1922 to 1925, she was one of only two white southerners on the faculty. The rest of the faculty was composed of white northerners and a few African Americans. Although the racial dynamics on the faculty were quite different than those at Paine College, where most of the faculty were African American, Young describes that the student body was quite similar.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Louise Young, February 14, 1972. Interview G-0066. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
So I took the
Hampton position, then I left there three years later to come back to
Scarritt College where I taught for 32 years. A gentleman who thought I
was doing very wrong said I didn't seem to understand the social
prestige that went with teaching at Hampton Institute. And I was able to
tell him that it had no social prestige in this part of the country,
teaching at Hampton Institute, a Negro college and it wasn't social
prestige in any sense that had drawn me there. But I tell you that story
because it really did have great social prestige in the North. It was
founded by Congregationist, Boston folk for the most part, and General
Armstrong was a great character and so on. There really were delightful
Northern people there. Very well educated, it was very well endowed and
it was beautifully equipped.
- ROBERT HALL:
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Were most of the teachers and administrators white?
- LOUISE YOUNG:
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Yes. There were white Northern people. I would tell them it was not
Hampton Institute Virginia, it was Hampton Institute Massachusetts. And
it very much was. And I was the only . . .
- ROBERT HALL:
-
Abolitionist . . .
- LOUISE YOUNG:
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That's right. And the only other southern white person . . . I want to
make sure of this . . . the only other southern white person on the
faculty was a Quaker who taught weaving. She was from North Carolina.
She said, I've been waiting for you for twenty years. But she and I were
the only southern white people on the faculty. And of
course the Negroes who mainly taught in the trade schools, but some
of them in the college too some very able gifted Negroes were on the
faculty. If you happen to be musical you know the name of
, the composer. He was in charge of music. But it
was really a very lovely delightful group of people from the standpoint
of social amenities.
- ROBERT HALL:
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The students were very much from the upper middleclass?
- LOUISE YOUNG:
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Yes, the students were very much like our Paine College students I'd say.
They were poor a lot of them but they were ambitious. I think that in my
experience the ambitious, well brought up, well behaved poor people are,
especially from the South, they have just as good manners and, I mean
there's no breach there. It's been poor people are not ambitious and are
not well brought up, and are not courteous. And I really think if you
want to say one good thing about the South you would say that the rule
of courtesy goes . . . used to anyway . . . almost all the way down.
However poor people are, they tend to be gentle and courteous to each
other and it's partly the rural of it maybe, I don't know what it is. So
that the only really strange group at Hampton of Negroes were the gullah
Negroes from the South Carolina coast. And
they could really hardly be understood. They were very black and their
speech was difficult. And they were so shy that it would be that they
would have to be on the campus six months or so before they got over the
strangeness and we got over the strangeness of their speech. But the
other Negroes were almost all of them southerners. A few northern
Negroes would come down to Hampton.
But now if you talk about isolation, they were just as isolated
but it was a very rich community.