Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923

Abstract

Founded near Jamestown, Virginia, in 1868, Hampton Institute educated almost 1400 members of sixty-five Indian tribes. Donal F. Lindsey examines the complex and changing interactions among Indigenous people, Blacks, and whites at the nation's premier industrial school for racial minorities. He traces the rise and decline of the Indian program in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while analyzing its impact in the U.S. campaign for Indian education. Lindsey also examines how the two marginalized races at Hampton viewed each other and white society. Though integration prevailed in much of student life, it resulted in an even greater accommodation to a racist society. The weaknesses and strengths attributed to one race were used with "tender violence" to remake the other, in a program in which the powerful and the powerless remained so without regard to segregation or integration.