Robert H. Terrell and the Sources of Black Conservatism

ABSTRACT

Black conservatism is often deemed a counterintuitive philosophy because it requires confidence in institutions and traditions that have not benefited Black people. In its classic moment within the American context, the movement centered on a combination of American exceptionalism and specific ideas about racial progress. This article traces some of the academic sources of one formulation of Black conservatism from the age of Booker T. Washington. A conservative optimism, I argue, was a reasonable response to a curriculum that combined the postbellum national mythology with antebellum race science. To show this, I follow the career of Robert H. Terrell, a distinguished judge of the D.C. court (1901–1925) who was among the first Black graduates of Harvard (1884). I examine his archived speeches and articles by comparison with educational materials from his various schools, beginning with the D.C. colored school system. Terrell's conservatism, I argue, stemmed largely from theoretical compromises with nineteenth‐century ethnology as it appeared in elementary textbooks and the Harvard curriculum.