The Hampton Project & Industrial-Education Colonialism

Artist’s Shift to Large-Scale Format

• Carrie Mae Weems (referred to as "Means" in transcript) expressed dissatisfaction with the limitations of her earlier 16 \times 20 in. black-and-white, matted photographs.

  • Called the size inadequate for conveying certain ideas & emotional registers.

  • Prompted a move toward mixed-media, site-specific, room-filling installations.

Overview of “The Hampton Project” (Installed 2000)

• Multi-part installation consisting of archival photographs printed on sheer muslin banners that hang from ceiling like floating scrolls.

  • Creates a ghostly, immersive, cathedral-like environment; viewers literally walk through history.

• Source imagery: Hampton University photographic archive—African-American & Native-American students, originally shot by white woman photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston for the Paris Exposition of 1900.

  • Johnston’s commission: display Hampton Institute as proof that formerly enslaved Blacks & recently conquered Indigenous peoples could be “civilized.”

• Installation goal: expose the racial & colonial logic embedded in the archive and in Hampton Institute’s founding mission.

Hampton University’s Archive

• Tens of thousands of photographs, many depicting Central Plains Indians.

• Extensive collection of tribal artifacts—often donated by former students.

• Archive doubles as:
  • cherished institutional heritage
  • documentary evidence of U.S. racial-colonial projects.

Hampton Institute’s Founding Agenda

• An HBCU employed as a laboratory for Americanization & settler colonialism.

  • Promoted as “civilizing” and “moralizing” campaign aimed at turning Blacks & Native Americans into compliant, semi-citizens.

  • Program asserted control over students’ bodies, labor, family structures, sexuality & spirituality.

• Education model: industrial/manual training paralleling Booker T. Washington’s philosophy but weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty.

• Sloganized as lifting pupils from “backwardness & savagery” into segregated, second-tier citizenship.

Spiritual Epigraph & Sonic Layer

• Weems chooses a spiritual line: “I’m a-rolling, I’m a-rolling, Lord.”

  • Functions as a shared lament for African-American and Indigenous experiences under the same systems of domination.

  • Banner text: “With your missionary might, you extend the hand of grace, reaching down and snatching me up and out of myself.”
    • Ironically captures paternalistic rescue narrative that erases subjects’ agency.

Generational Transmission of Colonial Logic

• Imagery & curation underscore how settler colonialism’s moral codes get passed parent-to-child just like material inheritance.

• Boys schooled in “proper” land use & agriculture; girls in homemaking & motherhood.

  • Mirrors plantation logic: ensure productive labor & reproduction of a subordinated workforce.

Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt & Captive Children

• Founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School praised Hampton’s model, calling it “unequaled” for Indian education.

• Collaboration with Hampton solidifies pipeline of Native students to industrial schools.

Early Targeting of Nez Perce Nation

• Hampton principal Samuel Chapman Armstrong petitioned Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to enroll Nez Perce students (even before meeting Pratt).

• Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph (In-ma-ton-yá-la-kékht) resisted illegal U.S. land seizure, articulated democratic principles of coexistence:

  • “We only ask an even chance to live as other men live, free to think and talk and act for myself.”

• Children’s enrollment framed as spoils of war and a mechanism for territorial control.

Photographic Strategy & Material Choice

• Weems reproduces Charles Roscoe Savage’s 1875 photo “Indian Baptism.”

  • Invokes forced religious conversion as part of civilizing mission.

• Prints on thin muslin (referred to as “fabric boasting a whisper-like quality”).

  • Evokes fragility of lives & stories; allows light to pass, creating spectral presence.

Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Paris Exposition Portfolio (1900)

• Hired by Hampton’s 2nd principal, Hollis B. Frissell, for PR campaign to display “success” of institute.

• Photos marketed the idea that Blacks (recently emancipated) & Natives (recently subdued) could assimilate.

Key Johnston Images Re-contextualized by Weems

1. “A Hampton Graduate at Home”

   • Nuclear family seated in modern dining room of a staircase house, dressed fashionably.

   • Projects bourgeois, heteropatriarchal norms as index of success.

2. “Trade School, Shoemaking”

   • White-appearing instructor with two Native students assembling shoes; two more seated behind.

   • Visual shorthand for industrial pedagogy & racialized division of labor.

“Doctor of Industrial Education” Concept

• Hampton floated idea of conferring university-recognized doctorates on non-university “free teachers.”

  • Would institutionalize a new class of racial intermediaries—Black & Native experts who disseminate industrial discipline within their communities.

• Weems interprets this as bonding the two groups as "siblings" inside a colonial border that defines American identity.

Economics of Student Labor

• Principal H. B. Frissell (and successor H. D. Pritchett) admitted Hampton’s financial dependence on student labor in 1898 funding plea.

  • School effectively operated as a factory producing commodified labor power cheap to the nation.

• Weems calls such info “the little-known facts & secrets that make a place.”

  • Secret = Hampton as engine of racialized, colonized labor rather than pure benevolent education.

Ethical & Practical Implications

• Installation positions archival photographs as living documents that still exert power.

• Provokes viewers to question how universities, museums, and archives perpetuate colonial violence even while celebrating diversity.

• Demonstrates art’s capacity to:

  1. Re-contextualize historical images.

  2. Surface suppressed narratives.

  3. Bridge Black & Indigenous histories of resistance.

• Warns that racism & colonialism are not past issues; their infrastructures remain embedded in education, labor, family, and land policy.

Connections to Wider Scholarship & Real-World Context

• Resonates with critiques by scholars like Michelle Burnham (on assimilationist education) and Glen Coulthard (on “recognition” & settler colonialism).

• Parallels Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model; yet underscores how Hampton targeted two racialized populations simultaneously.

• Illuminates ongoing debates on:
  • land acknowledgments
  • reparations for boarding-school abuses
  • decolonizing university archives.

Takeaway Equations & Figures (for quick recall)

• Photo dimensions: 16 \times 20 in.

• Installation debut: 2000.

• Paris Exposition date: 1900.

• Savage photo date: 1875.

• Fundraising letter acknowledging student labor: 1898.

• Number of tribes (or “nations”) represented in early Hampton Native enrollment: 65 (as cited by Weems).