"I do not inveigh against higher education, I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of, is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done"
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The sentence performs a careful rhetorical balancing act: it bows toward “higher education” while quietly fencing it off. Fortune’s “I do not inveigh” is a preemptive defense against a predictable charge: that arguing for “elementary and industrial” schooling is a concession to white Southern expectations that Black ambition be kept practical, local, and nonthreatening. The phrasing is polite; the power move is in the narrowing.
“Stand most in need of” sounds like neutral triage, but it smuggles in a hierarchy of deservingness. Need becomes a leash. In the post-Reconstruction South, education wasn’t simply uplift; it was a battleground over citizenship, labor, and political agency. When Fortune says Black Southerners “should be instructed for the work to be done,” the passive voice matters: whose work, defined by whom, and in service of what social order? The line harmonizes with the era’s industrial-education logic often used to reassure white funders and legislators that schooling would produce compliant workers rather than rivals for professional power or office.
Context sharpens the tension. Fortune, a formidable Black journalist and advocate, operated in a world where lynching, disfranchisement, and economic coercion punished Black autonomy. In that atmosphere, arguing for “industrial” training could read as tactical: a bid to secure any educational foothold amid hostile budgets and violent backlash. Yet the subtext remains unsettling: a politics of survival that risks hardening into a philosophy of limitation, where education is valued chiefly as labor preparation, not as a claim to full intellectual and civic equality.
“Stand most in need of” sounds like neutral triage, but it smuggles in a hierarchy of deservingness. Need becomes a leash. In the post-Reconstruction South, education wasn’t simply uplift; it was a battleground over citizenship, labor, and political agency. When Fortune says Black Southerners “should be instructed for the work to be done,” the passive voice matters: whose work, defined by whom, and in service of what social order? The line harmonizes with the era’s industrial-education logic often used to reassure white funders and legislators that schooling would produce compliant workers rather than rivals for professional power or office.
Context sharpens the tension. Fortune, a formidable Black journalist and advocate, operated in a world where lynching, disfranchisement, and economic coercion punished Black autonomy. In that atmosphere, arguing for “industrial” training could read as tactical: a bid to secure any educational foothold amid hostile budgets and violent backlash. Yet the subtext remains unsettling: a politics of survival that risks hardening into a philosophy of limitation, where education is valued chiefly as labor preparation, not as a claim to full intellectual and civic equality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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