to: Craft > #25 - Transmission of Craft Knowledge, Part 3
Image taken from the report on the Hancock Street Chapel in Louisville, Kentucky’s sewing school run by the Presbyterian Church. Featured in An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863-1910: The Religious, Moral, and Educational Development of the American Negro Since His Emancipation.
Transmission of Craft Knowledge, Part 3
Mellanee Goodman
The end of the American Reconstruction Era (1877) brought tremendous changes to the lives of Black women and men. For Black craftswomen, this new period of racial subjugation ushered in more limitations on their lives. Coursework for Black girls can be seen through the Hancock School in Louisville, Kentucky. Education at the Hancock Street Chapel was overseen by the local Presbyterian Church. In 1899, upon receipt of a note brought in and signed by two students that allegedly stated that the girls were without a substantial amount of clothing, the Presbyterian Church Sunday-school teachers began a course in sewing.
Contextualization
In 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, vocational and training schools rapidly sprang up across the United States to transition slaves into “free” American society. These schools included industrial and normal institutions that often followed the philosophy that handwork was critical to the development of good moral character that sculpted a healthy heart and healthy mind. [1] The curriculum for African American schools was based on paternalism directed by white Americans. As Marei Lo suggests “the concomitant rise of industrial education in which handicraft was viewed as a means of racial assimilation… that emerged to prepare recently freed slaves, American Indians, and the inhabitants of new American colonies for participation in the capitalist economy.” [2] The curriculum for young women and girls in particular was designed around domestic labor such as sewing, basketry, and dressmaking.
[1] Industrial institutes were vocational schools established for Black students and fireside industries were vocational schools established for white students. Anna Fariello, “Making and Naming: The Lexicon of Studio Craft” in Extra/Ordinary. ed. Maria Elena Buszek. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2011), 34. Normal institutions were for the training of high school graduate students to be teachers..
[2] Marie Lo, “Handcrafting Whiteness: Booker T. Washington and the Subject of Contemporary Craft.” ASAP/Journal 5, no. 2 (2020), 425 - 426.
Further Reading
John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen, Proceedings of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen. United States: The Fund, (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co Publishing)
Shaw, Stephanie ‘We are not educating individuals but manufacturing levers’: Schooling Reinforcements” in What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Hartshorn, W. N., and George W. Penniman. 1910. An era of progress and promise, 1863-1910: the religious, moral, and educational development of the American Negro since his emancipation. (Boston: Priscilla Pub. Co., 1910)
Biography
Mellanee Goodman
She/Her/Hers
Written by Amy Meissner
Mellanee Goodman loves glimpsing mountaintops from every window in her North Carolina home. Her love for nature and “uphill and downhill” terrain brought her closer to place-based research studying the history of Black craftswomen in the upper South, including Southern Appalachia, from 1850¬–1910. This investigation reveals craft of the everyday and domestic that is often overlooked or erased due to the violent mobilization of Black bodies as methods of production. Mellanee’s interest lies in the craft work of Black women in particular––mattresses, brooms, spun thread, woven cloth, and knitted and sewn garments––objects made for the master’s plantation homes, but also for families in enslaved quarters. While most of these items no longer exist nor retain attribution to the original maker, her study of ex-slave narratives, newspaper clippings, and the education of the formerly enslaved after emancipation pieces together a more complete picture of craft- and place-based identities of Black craftswomen, some of whom lived in the same mountains Mellanee currently calls home.