John Frederick Bell. Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. 298 pp.

Abstract

“We must get more students, and especially more white students” (p. 182). With those words written in 1892, Berea College president William Goodell Frost proposed a supposedly minor change to his institution. Berea had been unique for decades, a distinctly interracial college with a solid majority of Black students, but Frost believed that an influx of White students would increase the school’s prestige. He was right. Frost’s plan to recruit “mountain whites” of the Appalachians attracted wealthy donors and brought a tenfold increase in Berea’s endowment over the next two decades. But within that same span, Berea’s Black students became first disaffected and then disqualified, turned away both by the laws of Jim Crow Kentucky and by a campus no longer amenable to racial integration. Just as many other hopeful results of emancipation failed, so too did this educational experiment. These are just a few of the possibilities and perils outlined by John Frederick Bell in this history of abolitionist colleges in the nineteenth-century United States. Degrees of Equality focuses on three institutions: Oberlin College, New York Central College, and Berea. Among predominantly White colleges of that era, they were some of the most prolific in their education of Black men and women. Because of their radical egalitarianism, they were perhaps the best hope for racial reconciliation through higher education. Yet, as Bell demonstrates, these three colleges offered only “mixed success” and “degrees of equality” (pp. x, 8). Despite founding principles and proclaimed objectives to the contrary, abolitionist colleges were unable to remedy “the gap between equal admission and equal acceptance” (p. 29). As it jumps between institutions and marches from the 1830s to the 1890s, Degrees of Equality finds a common thread. While each college took its own path, all three exhibited the same tensions between equality in theory and in practice. The fundamental question, as Bell puts it, was whether “racial equality” was “a goal to be realized or a fact to be honored” (p. 44). In our own time and in light of racism’s persistence, we might read this and lean toward equality as an ongoing process rather than a fait accompli. But the abolitionist colleges asked something different: Were Black collegians to be treated as equals because they had proved themselves equals (through attainment of learning, character, and the like), or because they were already equals, heirs of the same common humanity endowed by God?