“We Take Those of Any Age”: The Almeda Gardner Girls School and Chester Pond’s “Prohibition-Industrial Colony” in the Mississippi Delta, 1890–1930

For three decades between the 1890s and the 1920s, the Almeda Girls Industrial School located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta trained a generation of Black female citizens at a time when formal schooling in the Magnolia State presented serious financial obstacles. While the American Missionary Association and Chester H. Pond’s venture trained adolescents and young women in the arts of personal hygiene, thrift, and agricultural efficiency, dynamic teachers and students received limited citizenship training at a time when the state of Mississippi rescinded rights African Americans had won during Reconstruction. Examining “colony school” education in its infancy, and in conjunction with the emerging values of post-emancipation Black culture, my research shows how the schooling of a handful of women later informed the values and instructional techniques of many Jeanes Teachers who served in one- and two-room rural schools across Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, this essay seeks to establish the educational roots of resistance to White oppression playing out at a small boarding school “experiment” in the heart of the demographic Black belt. Focus on the education of young women during the Progressive Era reveals Black agency that can broaden understanding of a dynamic interplay between patrons and the philanthropic organizations that provided educational opportunities to African Americans in the Deep South.