American Negro Academy

The American Negro Academy (ANA), founded in Washington, DC in 1897, was the first organization in the United States to support African-American academic scholarship. It operated until 1928,[1][2][3] and encouraged African Americans to undertake classical academic studies and liberal arts.

It was intended to provide support to African Americans working in classic scholarship and the arts, as promoted by W.E.B. Du Bois in his essays about the Talented Tenth, and others of the elite. This was in contrast to Booker T. Washington's approach to education at Tuskegee University in Alabama, which he led. There he emphasized vocational and industrial training for southern blacks, which he thought were more practical for the lives that most blacks would live in the rural, segregated South.

  1. ^ McDonald, Joy A. (2009). "American Negro Academy". In Finkelman, Paul (ed.). Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: from the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. Oxford University Press. pp. 58–60. ISBN 978-0-19-516779-5. OCLC 312624445.
  2. ^ McDonald, Joy A. (2009-02-09). "American Negro Academy". African American Studies Center (Report). Oxford African American Studies Center. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.45204. ISBN 978-0-19-530173-1.
  3. ^ Smith