Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923

Reform and racism at the famed industrial school

Founded in 1868, Hampton Institute educated almost 1400 members of sixty-five Native American peoples. Donal F. Lindsey examines the interactions among Indigenous people, Blacks, and whites at the nation’s premier industrial school for racial minorities.

Lindsey's analysis traces the rise and decline of the program for Indigenous Americans while analyzing the program’s impact on the campaign for Native education. Lindsey also examines how the two marginalized races at Hampton viewed each other and white society. Though integration prevailed in much of student life, it resulted in even greater accommodation to a racist society. The weaknesses and strengths attributed to one race were used with “tender violence” to remake the other, in a program in which the powerful and the powerless remained so regardless of segregation or integration.