Negotiated Space: The Black College Campus as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America

"HBCUs emerged between the 1860s and the 1930s in response to the desire of African Americans—and their supporters—to build a system of higher education to facilitate their social, economic, and political uplift. Their concerted effort to achieve this goal, however, frequently sparked threatening responses from some white Southerners. Such Southerners felt that black education undermined the agricultural economy of the region by endangering the supply of agricultural labor, which blacks still provided in the postbellum South—a demand that resided within the larger requirement that blacks remain under the control of a white power structure. Booker T. Washington’s negotiation of this conflict was expressed by his educational philosophy, which emphasized vocational training for blacks. As a landscape architecture scholar, I am interested in how such conflicts and accommodations were also expressed spatially by Tuskegee’s and other HBCU campuses. How did Tuskegee’s planners anticipate the possibility that the product of their labor could be “blown up” because of some perceived infraction against the delicate social, economic, and political boundaries of the time? Can we unearth from such features as the location and layout of the HBCU campus a spatial record of this conflict and of the more subtle day-to-day forms of racial subordination? Can the built environment, a mute form, serve as a primary source for history to compensate for the paucity of written records about ordinary and marginalized people or the silence that typically shrouds the memory of painful events in the African American experience?" 

Grandison, Kenrick Ian, “Negotiated Space: The Black College Campus as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America,” American Quarterly Vol 51, No 3 (Sept. 1999): 529-579.