ABSTRACT
Historians have had dif¿ culty categorizing normal schools and conceptualizing their role within patterns of American school-going. The general tendency has been to consider these institutions as mere extensions of common schooling-at best, high school “plus,” with the “plus” mostly a few lectures in pedagogy and perhaps review sessions in basic academic subjects. But should they be considered by their aspirations, and sometimes by their practice, as fundamentally outside the realm of common schooling, given the “professional” training and “higher” education that characterized the normal school ideal? The seamless transformation of normal schools into teachers colleges, well underway by the 1920s and virtually completed during the 1930s, is an unexplored reminder that the web of higher education in the United States has many historical threads. 1
These problems of categorization and conceptualization apply with perhaps greater force with regard to normal schools for African
The tendency of historical narratives to emphasize Black college-going is understandable, given the denial of educational opportunities during slavery and a national context of persistent denigration of African American intellectual abilities. However, this celebration of undeniable achievements has had hidden and unfortunate effects in terms of crafting a nuanced exploration of the rich and varied institutional infrastructure that characterized African American education from the Civil War through the 1940s. On the one hand, an incomplete understanding of African American higher education has often led to distorted comparisons between Black and White colleges and university at very different stages of their historical evolutions. Black institutions (and Black collegiate populations generally) have commonly been “normed” against White counterparts within single historical periods and in these comparisons Black colleges have often been found “ de¿ cient.” On the other hand, more to the point of this essay, the role of teacher training and normal schools within the development of African American educational advancement has been fundamentally obscured.
