PBS documentary explores the ‘Tuskegee of the North’
Upcoming PBS documentary takes a look at one of the only all-black schools in the 1800s...
From EbonyJet:
From 1886 through the first half of the 21st century—when the schooling of African-Americans was little more than an afterthought—The Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in Bordentown, New Jersey was quietly educating dozens of brown children in math, the sciences and the arts. For all who attended, the school, which came to be known simply as “Bordentown,” was an educational utopia, a boarding school drawing families who were in search of an environment where their children could get the quality instruction society at large thought them incapable of absorbing.
For seventy years, this “Tuskeegee of the North” went about the business of turning out graduates who went on to become doctors, engineers and college professors. Situated on 400 acres, the school bridged the gap between the intellectual ideology of W.E.B. Dubois and the practicum of Booker T. Washington, maintaining farm fields for agricultural instruction and work shops for mechanical instruction alongside it’s classrooms where reading of the classics and study of foreign languages was required. Bordentown enjoyed a reputation for equipping its students with the intellectual breadth and life skills necessary to become productive citizens of the republic. Ironically, it was social progression that did the institution in.
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