Blog #3: Précis on “The Aesthetics of Uplift: The Hampton-Tuskegee Idea and the Possibility of Failure”

In Allyson Field’s chapter “The Aesthetics of Uplift: The Hampton-Tuskegee Idea and the Possibility of Failure”, Field introduces the Hampton-Tuskegee Idea, which was a method of training and educating Black people started by Booker T. Washington. Washington was a graduate of the original Hampton Institute, which opened post-Civil War in the late 1860s. The Hampton Institute was focused on instilling a strong foundation in Christian morality, and character building through this religious-based education. Students learned practical, useful life skills. The Hampton-Tuskegee Idea elaborated this concept of education to emphasize the self-help aspect of learning, and furthered the importance of performing hard work and being useful. The hope was to create black educators who would be economically self-sufficient and spread the uplift rhetoric through the south and up to the north.

The Hampton-Tuskegee idea relied on publicity campaigns to gain support and influence the public’s opinions. These campaigns included advertisements such as pamphlets, photography, and motion picture once the technology was available. The campaigns had the goal of providing a visual effect to argue for African American uplift, and prove the need for uplift institutions. In a way, these campaigns also served as a comfort to whites to reduce the threat of educated Black people. This was accomplished through the focus on success and the possibility of failure.

Field describes Washington’s rhetorical strategies in publicizing the Hampton-Tuskegee Idea with three main concepts/themes. The students were posed as a sort of “raw material” themselves, transformed by the labor they perform just as the materials they handle. The success of these students served as a kind of whitening as well, especially through the photography Field discusses in this chapter. Lastly, the inverse of success, failure, is utilized to celebrate the students who do not reach success, and lift them up. Before-and-after sequencing/pairings help perpetuate this concept of success, and additionally helped African Americans move temporally from slavery to freedom.

One example of the possibility of failure is a fictional story of a student named Cunningham. Unsuccessful as a student, he returns to where he came from, but serves as a teacher. This was to point out that “even Hampton’s weakest students can make a positive impact on the lives of others” (Field 44) and reduces the threat of educating Black people. Field points out that the story of Cunningham puts forth the idea that the “worst” that can happen is a dropout educating younger, illiterate children to become “quasi-literate” as well.

The before-and-after pairings in photography juxtaposed the old and new life of the Hampton-Tuskegee students, to make the school’s mission clear and emphasize achievement. A series of photographs shot by Frances Benjamin Johnston shows one example of a student who returned to their home and built a better life for the family, essentially replacing their father as the family’s provider. Photographs included in a brochure by Leigh Richard Miner also use this before-and-after pairing to create a spectacle of the redemption of African Americans, and Field argues that this idea of success includes whitewashing. In this case, success requires a student to become less black. Miner’s works focus on students arriving at the academy, and the work performed while students. These shots have an intimate feel and give the viewer a sense of the self-sufficiency and hard work the students are committed to. The composition of the photographs emphasize their labor, and their often bent-over positions and illumination next to windows contribute a sense of dynamism that appeals to white potential donors. Field defines these qualities of the photographs as constitutive of uplift aesthetics.

The complexity of these publicity images is due to the struggle to gain capital support for the institution, while attempting to be “‘void of offense’ to its mainly white audience” (Field 81). The uplift photography represents the progress the institutions made, and gave way to uplift cinema which began to “broaden the representation of Black civic culture” (Field 82) away from educational institutions, and was aimed at the north rather than the rural south.