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Working under Adversity Interracial cooperation characterized the work at CII from its inception as a freedmen's school in 1866, when white Baptists and Friends in Philadephia supported it financially. The Friends' Freedman's Association of Philadelphia (FFA), who owned and operated CII during the Booker T. Washington era, kept a close eye on operations and considered carefully the advice of the school's African-American principals. CII's African-American faculty, meanwhile, earned the respect of many local white citizens. Both of these traits were evident in FFA member William S. Vaux Jr.'s visit to CII in April 1900. Vaux was generally positive in his review, and clearly supportive of the school's work. At the same time, however, he expressed some of the prejudice many white northern benefactors felt towards their southern, African-American beneficiaries. Vaux noted the school's "lack of Yankee thrift" and he was irritated at a lack of punctuality. His report, however, demonstrated how well the African-American faculty worked with their white supporters in Philadelphia and with white merchants and teachers in Christiansburg as well. Read Vaux's report of his visit to CII in 1900. Racism hampered Christiansburg Industrial Institute's progress. The building committee reported in 1902, for example, that white brickmasons were sabotaging the black masons' work on CII's first brick dormitory building.
Fighting racism was difficult but CII's faculty did it through hard work, high moral standards, and, occasionally, through thoughtful protest. Teacher Edgar A. Long wrote an essay for submission to the Saturday Evening Post denouncing an article they published by Thomas Dixon, Jr. This racist novelist excused whites who lynched black men by asserting that black men lusted after white women. Long's letter reversed the charges, pointing to white men's sexual exploitation of African American women under slavery. Dixon also feared that Booker T. Washington's education system was "not training Negroes to take their place in any industrial system in the south in which the white man can direct or control him." Instead, "He is training them all to be Masters of men, to be independant..." Long noted dryly that Dixon's emphasis on the "tragic fact of the Negro's progress...has paid the Negro the highest complement." Click the images below to read Long's handwritten copy of the essay. Above: Edgar A. Long, "Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Negro," essay for submission to the Saturday Evening Post, undated [ca. 19 August 1904], Long Papers, Christiansburg Institute Collection.
CII provided a haven, to a limited extent, from daily encounters with white people's racisim. The faculty were well-respected by many white people in town and boarding students socialized on campus. But Principal Edgar A. Long often left on business to places where he was not known. In August 1915, traveling to Martinsville, Virginia, he recorded the degrading ploy by which he and his friend W. T. Bentley "got by." Since Bentley was fair-skinned, he could "play white" and sleep in a white person's house, while Long had to "play nigger" and sleep in a shed. This kind of racisim hemmed in life for all African Americans, no matter what level of education or social status they had acheived in their own communities. Read an excerpt from Edgar A. Long's travel notebook, 11-13 August 1915. CII's mission was in part to give students strength to face such challenges. In Long's weekly chapel messages, he both cautioned students and fortified them. On October 24, 1915, perhaps recalling his own experiences in August, Long instructed his students, "When we have to restrain our selves--not because we are afraid but because we feel that we don't get a square deal in the law, we are really gaining in Manhood- Because we are learning self control."
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