On the afternoon of June 25, 1909, Booker T. Washington, the most famous African American leader of the early twentieth century, delivered a speech in the town of Christiansburg, Virginia, located along the Transamerican bicycle route 76. According to a newspaper report, beneath the apple trees that shaded the lawn of the Christiansburg Industrial Institute, Washington spoke to an audience estimated to have reached as many as five thousand people. Following Principal Edgar A. Long\u2019s introduction of the man described as the \u201cmost noted\u201d Black man in the country, Washington\u2019s speech emphasized the need for blacks and whites alike to make the most of their available circumstances. Washington\u2019s message of pragmatism guided by idealism spoke strongly to both races, and made the diversity of the crowd encountered at the Christiansburg Institute typical of the reception throughout the South as he promoted his vision for African-American education and uplift. An exploration of the history of Booker T. Washington\u2019s visit to the Christiansburg Institute thus provides a basis for exploring the complex relationship between race and education in Virginia during Jim Crow segregation while also making connections to current issues related to identity, opportunity, and equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Welcome to episode 21 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the town of Christiansburg, located just over 350 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just under 200 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound rides enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Christiansburg Institute was founded immediately after the Civil War through the combined efforts of emancipated slaves seeking to educate their children and the federal government\u2019s Freedmen\u2019s Bureau which envisioned primary and secondary education as key to the transformation from slavery to emancipation. The first director of the school, Charles Schaeffer, was a former Union army officer who worked with parents, pastors, and other community members to establish a school for the children of freed slaves in Montgomery County. The school began in a room in the home of a free African American woman, Nancy Cambell, and enrollment reached nearly three hundred pupils with two teachers within a few years. In the 1870s, after the federal government eliminated the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau, the school was administered by the Friends\u2019 Freedmen\u2019s Association based in Pennsylvania. In 1895, Booker T. Washington was appointed as superintendent, with the goal of transforming the school into the model of the Tuskegee Institute by emphasizing practical education, including cooking, sewing, blacksmithing, and printing. Charles Marshall, principal until 1906, and Edgar A. Long, principal until 1924, marked a new era of African American leadership for a school attracting regional attention for its leading role in educating African American children from across southwest Virginia. The school embodied Washington\u2019s belief that \u201ceconomic independence is the foundation of political independence.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Booker T. Washington\u2019s visit to Christiansburg should be remembered not only as a moment in the life of an influential man and in the progress of his educational mission for the South, but also as a turning point in the development of the Christiansburg Institute, an institution that embodied his vision. For Washington, the visit to Cambria was one stop on a tour of Virginia, during which he sought to survey the economic, social, and educational status of African-Americans in the state and to raise money for his educational projects. A flyer for the tour urged the population: \u201cDon\u2019t fail to hear this great exponent of Negro education.\u201d The tour began in Norfolk, just a few miles from Yorktown, the starting and ending point of the Transamerican\u2019s Bicycle Route. Washington\u2019s itinerary followed the Virginian Railway line, generally south of the Transamerican Bicycle Route, with scheduled stops along the so-called \u201cblack belt\u201d of communities with high proportions of African-American residents. Washington believed that touring through the South provided a forum in which leading whites could support his efforts to lift up African-American communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As superintendent of Christiansburg Institute, Washington\u2019s main involvement with the school was in assigning graduates of the Tuskegee Institute to serve as principals and teachers. Although initially recruited by the Quaker Friends\u2019 Freedmen\u2019s Association, who administered the school after the dissolution of the Federal Freedmen\u2019s Bureau in 1870, Washington\u2019s affiliation with the institute was largely that of a figurehead, removed from the day-to-day running of the school. On this occasion, however, his travels through Virginia brought him close enough to the campus to allow him to accept a speaking invitation, which set into motion the series of events that culminated in this \u201cexceedingly interesting day\u201d for the gathered audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Principal Long and the people of this region, a visit from the \u201cmost noted\u201d Black leader was a momentous event. According to newspaper reports, many stores closed so that merchants and clerks could hear the speech, and the funds to pay for the visit included many donations from prominent white citizens. Once the group arrived in Christiansburg, they discovered that \u201cNo pains had been spared to make this meeting successful.\u201d Newspapers reported that \u201cwhite people were no less enthusiastic\u201d than the leaders of the African American community. According to the Montgomery Messenger, Washington was met at the railway station and escorted to the campus \u201cby a special committee on horseback,\u201d composed of many of the leading African-American men of Christiansburg and adjacent towns. The welcoming committee included Christiansburg Institute teachers Artis S. Topsey, John Lester, William H. Griffin, and Ladonia Carr, at least seven men identified as ministers, and parents such as J. D. Jones and others. Between fifty and one hundred men, many on horseback, accompanied Washington and his traveling companions the five miles from the train station. The Cambria Brass Band joined the delegation as it paraded through the streets to the Christiansburg Industrial Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to a contemporary report, more white people than African-Americans gathered to hear Washington\u2019s speech at the Christiansburg Institute. The audience was drawn from as far away as Radford, Pulaski and Roanoke. Among the distinguished guests on the platform was former Virginia Governor John Tyler, who had driven fifteen miles from his home in Radford to \u201csay a word.\u201d The mayor of Christiansburg, W. C. Flagg, was invited to make introductory comments, along with at least one member of the Christiansburg Town Council. Other speakers included the Reverend T. J. J. Mosby of the African-American Baptist church and Captain J. R. Johnson, a prominent white lawyer also identified as \u201ca former Confederate officer,\u201d who praised Washington as \u201cdistinguished and honored.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his introductory comments, Principal Long declared: \u201cI do not believe that there can be found in the whole south a community that is more liberal minded and friendly in its attitude\u201d toward African Americans \u201cthan is true right here in Christiansburg.\u201d Principal Long assured the visiting Washington that in his thirteen years in the Cambria community, he had \u201cnever known a serious altercation\u201d between a white man and a Black man. Long further claimed that Washington had come to a region \u201cwhere there has never been a lynching, where the jail is empty and the schoolhouse is full.\u201d Echoing Washington\u2019s emphasis on economic self-sufficiency, Long announced that 90% of African-American men in the community owned their own homes, and that six grocery stores owned by African-Americans operated in the town, which was \u201cmade possible by the interest and assistance of our white friends.\u201d Making a connection between Christiansburg Institute and Washington\u2019s educational projects, Long concluded, \u201cYou are speaking to a people interested in the development\u201d of African Americans \u201cand especially in the work you are doing at Tuskegee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following this flattering introduction, the ovation was so great that Washington could not speak for several minutes. When he was finally able to begin, Washington emphasized the need for those assembled and their neighbors to take advantage of opportunities at hand, within the existing circumstances of the region. His words echoed the sentiment of his famous \u201cAtlanta Compromise speech\u201d of 1895, in which he entreated Southern blacks and whites to \u201ccast down your bucket where you are\u201d in cooperative pursuit of regional uplift. In his remarks at Christiansburg Institute, Washington praised the examples of thrift, industry, refinement, and intelligence visible in the community\u2019s successful agriculture. He made the following statement to the crowd: \u201cWe must lay a deep foundation in broad Christian character; we must get mental ability sufficient for our need and we must learn to do something well that the world wants done. These, my friends, are the absolute essentials for any race in the primitive stages of its progress.\u201d Speaking more directly to the white members of the audience, Washington concluded: \u201cNo man can keep another in the ditch without getting down in the ditch with him. When we rise, you rise; when we go down, you go down.\u201d Declaring that African Americans were \u201cin this country to stay,\u201d Washington exhorted the white people to help African American become good citizens: \u201cIn proportion as you close the ballot boxes to my people I urge that you open the school houses to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Washington\u2019s success in drawing large, supportive, and mixed-race audiences illustrates his ability to navigate the complexities of Southern race relations at the turn-of-the-century. For the African-American community, the presence of a nationally prominent educator speaking to their needs and promoting their opportunities certainly had a powerful impact. Yet the positive white response to the Washington philosophy should be seen also as a reflection of social inequality which this message of reconciliation did little to challenge. In the estimates of other African-American leaders, particularly the noted academic W. E. B. DuBois, Washington represented \u201cthe old attitude of adjustment and submission,\u201d and his program \u201cpractically accepts the alleged inferiority\u201d of African Americans. Washington\u2019s greatest strength also limited his efforts to a series of incremental successes, but without a more comprehensive engagement of a complex problem. Directly addressing the presumptions of racial privilege would require the variegated efforts of the civil-rights movement that developed across the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Christiansburg Institute flourished in two decades that followed Washington\u2019s speech. The campus expanded considerably with new buildings, including the Edgar A Long building, named after the principal who welcomed Washington in 1909. Constructed primarily by students, teachers, and community members, using bricks manufactured on the campus, this building still stands on the center of campus, visible from Franklin Street and the Transamerican Bicycle Route. Christiansburg Institute expanded to include dormitories as students enrolled from across southwest Virginia. When the African American high school in Pulaski burned down in 1938, the county school board decided to bus students to Christiansburg rather than offer a local high school to the African American populations. Christiansburg Institute developed a summer program training teachers who filled African American schools across Virginia in this era of rigid Jim Crow Segregation. During the Great Depression, as the economic crisis forced many philanthropic organizations to reduce their activities, Christiansburg Institute became a public school as part of the Montgomery County system, along with white high schools as well as a few primary schools serving local students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even as the school grew in size and prestige, the civil rights movement in Virginia pushed for the integration of public schooling as a step towards full equality for African Americans. The state responded to this pressure in the late 1940s by expanding facilities in African American schools, which led to the building of a new gymnasium, still standing on the site, in a failed effort to convince the public that schools could be separate and equal. The Supreme Court decision in 1954 put an end to these efforts, even as \u201cmassive resistance\u201d led by the state government, local school boards, and white community leaders sought desperately to prevent school integration. These efforts finally came to an end in the late 1950s, leading to the final, and perhaps most tragic, stage in the history of Christiansburg Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early 1960s, African Americans parents and school children who petitioned to attend white schools were gradually granted permission to begin integration. Blacksburg High School was integrated in 1961 and Christiansburg High School followed a few years later. These steps toward desegregation led the Montgomery County School Board to the decision to close Christiansburg Institute. In 1966, almost exactly one hundred years after the school was founded, the school closed and all students were reassigned to schools in their home districts. The buildings were sold by the county, and much of the land was sold to developers to become townhouses and industrial sites. One section of the Christiansburg Institute campus became the site for the new Christiansburg High School. Just a few buildings located on Franklin Street were preserved or repurposed, thus providing visible reminders of this connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The evolution of this struggle and its historical impact serve to inform and inspire the mission of today\u2019s incarnation of the Christiansburg Institute. The Christiansburg Alumni Association and Christiansburg Institute, Inc. seek to promote and preserve the unique history of African American education in Montgomery County and surrounding regions. Working with partner organizations, municipal and county governments, teachers in public schools, and numerous programs at Virginia Tech, these efforts to remember and commemorate events like the visit of Booker T. Washington are central to this mission of uncovering and publicizing the significant role that this institution has played in the history of Southwest Virginia. Washington\u2019s call to his audience on a summer day in Cambria, \u201cwe must learn to do something well that the world wants done,\u201d is an appeal for excellence, achievement, and equality that continues to reverberate to the present day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cyclists along the Transamerican route have several opportunities to connect with this remarkable moment in history. The Christiansburg Institute campus is just a few blocks from the route, as indicated by the historical marker on Franklin Street, just one block from the bicycle route. As noted earlier, several buildings are still visible, including the Edgar A. Long building, the gymnasium (now a child care center), and the cadet training building on the campus of Christiansburg High School. Schaeffer Memorial Baptist Church, where many of the families integral to the formation of this school attended services, has a driveway on Route 76. A permanent display outside the old post office in downtown Christiansburg relates this history, thus providing an effective counter-narrative to the monument to confederate soldiers placed at this site during the Jim Crow era. These historical buildings, signs, and exhibitions are enduring reminders of the importance of understanding these moments in the history of Christiansburg, Virginia, and the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You have been listening to episode 21 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the town of Christiansburg, located just over 350 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just under 200 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound rides enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. To learn more about the stories in this episode, visit our website or follow us on social media, all accessible for the homepage for this podcast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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