Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — Part 3 — The Educational System in 19th Century America

African-Americans at the end of the Civil War craved accep­tance as a peo­ple and this hope was only par­tially rec­i­p­ro­cated. Edu­ca­tion in the late 19^th Cen­tury was either a short-lived moment in a person’s life or a multi-year lux­ury that few in the gen­eral pop­u­lace could afford. Whites had an eas­ier path to it, but African-Americans had an even harder road toward it. But it wasn’t for try­ing. Booker T. Wash­ing­ton, the famous pro­po­nent of edu­ca­tion for freed­men in the post-Reconstruction South, founded the Tuskegee Nor­mal and Indus­trial Insti­tute to help edu­cate African-Americans. He real­ized that in mod­ern soci­ety African-Americans would have to be edu­cated, and edu­cated well, in order to excel. It was a belief that was shared by many African-Americans at the time: that edu­ca­tion could help set them on an equal foot­ing with their white coun­ter­parts in both jobs and social stature.

Edu­ca­tional reform in the United States was just gain­ing momen­tum in the late 19^th cen­tury. Before that time edu­cat­ing enslaved African-Americans in the South was for­bid­den by law in many states, but in the North, where schools for African Amer­i­cans did exist, they were gen­er­ally housed in crowded build­ings staffed by teach­ers of low q

ual­i­fi­ca­tions and restricted to the knowl­edge of the teacher. African-American par­ents also grouped together to make pri­vate arrange­ments for school­ing and often times hired their own teach­ers. Pub­lic schools did out­num­ber pri­vate ones, but the qual­ity of edu­ca­tional ser­vices var­ied from school to school, with the qual­ity of teach­ing depend­ing on how much the par­ents were will­ing to spend to pay teachers.

In fact, many of the schools formed would hardly be rec­og­nized as such by mod­ern stan­dards. Ele­men­tary edu­ca­tion was avail­able to African-Americans, but higher, more spe­cial­ized, edu­ca­tional ser­vices that would pro­duce more respect among the already somewhat-doubting white class was harder to attain.

Due in part to this, illit­er­acy rates among African-Americans were tracked at a stag­ger­ing 79.9% in 1870, the first year that such sta­tis­tics were col­lected. With improve­ments in edu­ca­tion this fig­ure dropped by roughly 10% in each decade that fol­lowed under­scor­ing the need for African-American edu­ca­tion.¹¹

It’s sur­pris­ing then that edu­ca­tion seemed to be of lit­tle fac­tor in the suc­cess of any of the black inven­tors men­tioned. Of the three, only one was able to attain a col­lege degree – McCoy. While, con­versely the most suc­cess­ful of the bunch – Woods who was also known as the “Black Edi­son” – had only a mea­ger ele­men­tary school edu­ca­tion. They proved that the sky was the limit for what could be achieved with cre­ativ­ity and knowl­edge of your sub­ject against the tra­di­tional think­ing that for­mal edu­ca­tion alone stood as the foun­da­tion for inven­tion of thought.
Next time, Edu­ca­tion as the Foun­da­tion of Invention