Hull House on the Delaware: Race, the Bordentown School, and Progressive Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 40
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Intellectual Change, and Progressivism

Abstract

This paper details the history of New Jersey’s Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth. In the first half of the twentieth century, Bordentown, as it was called, was among the best known schools in African America. It combined an academically and socially distinguished faculty with training that fitted working-class students for jobs as industrial workers and domestic servants. At the same time, it was a center of African American social, cultural and political activity. The school simultaneously earned the praise of John Dewey and W.E. B. Du Bois for its progressive practices and the nickname, “the Tuskegee of the North.” The paper demonstrates how racial politics and class relations shaped the history of the school and its pedagogy.

Author

• Daniel Perlstein, University of California - Berkeley