571 Audubon St
New Orleans, LA 70118, USA

James H.Dillard House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:

James Hardy Dillard born October 24, 1856, at the family plantation in to tidewater region of Virginia. His family were landed aristocracy in the Southern tradition, farmer's Delight, as the plantation was called, consisted of extensive land and 350 slaves. The Civil War ended the family' affluence, but it did not change his parents’ attitudes on a correct, traditional education for their son.

Dillard received his early education from his mother and from a neighboring teacher who held classes in a nearby Baptist Church. At the age of twelve he wp sent to live with his aunt- in Norfolk, Virginia. There he attended ® R- Salt. Galt's school stressed the traditional curriculum with its emphasis on language, mathematics, and history. Here Dillard completed his secondary education.

In 1873 he entered Washington and Lee, where he graduated in 1875 with high honors. In 1876 he completed his Master of Arts degree and a year later won the additional degree of Bachelor of Laws. Although Dillard had wanted to practice law, he turned instead to teaching profession.

His first position was the principalship of the Rodman School at Norfolk. In 1882 he was appointed co-principal of the Norfolk Academy, a position he held for the next five years. During his ten years as a secondary school administrator and instructor, Dillard published a number of articles on pedagogical subjects and a mathematics textbook. For several years he also taught at the Sauveur Summer School of languages at several northern colleges Thanks to his publication record and his work at the college level. Dillard principalship of the Women's College of Washington University in St. Louis. He remained in St. Louis until 1891. When col. William P. Johnson, an old friend and teacher, called him to Tulane University in New ‘Orleans as a professor of- Latin.

Dillard was 35 when he moves to New Orleans and entered on his new duties. Up until that time his experience has been closely tied to the life of a school administrator and teacher. By 1894 he had been elected Dean of Tulane's College of Arts and Sciences. He was also very active in civic president of the public library and president of the Child welfare Association. At one time his fellow citizens urged him to run for mayor, as a university dean and civic leader Dillard seemed well on the way to becoming an established and respected member of New Orleans society.

The second program associated with Dillard, this time in his capacity as director of the Slater Fund, was the county training institute. Dillard is said to have conceived and instituted this program himself. Under the program black teachers in the public schools met yearly on a county wide basis to attend teacher training courses. The Slater Fund provided the funds for the institutes. Both the Jeanes supervisor and the country training institute programs expanded black elementary and secondary education and improved its quality. A major result was that the black colleges gradually dropped their elementary and secondary education programs. They thus could concentrate their energies and resources on providing an emerging black leadership with a quality higher education.

In addition to the Jeanes and Slater Funds’ programs Dillard also influenced other programs. Through his membership on Rockefeller's General Education Board, the Southern Education Board, and the Phelps-Stokes Fund, he made inputs to the black education programs of these important organizations.

Dillard's role in black education was a reflection of the contradictions inherit in black education in the South at the beginning of the 20th Century. He accepted the basic premises of southern society. The South dictated a biracial arrangement of its people. As Henry Allen Bullock writes, "Negroes were to be kept socially isolated from whites by means of a rigid system of residential segregation; they were to be limited to special occupational pursuits by means of job restrictions; they were to be tailored to 'Negro ways through a rigid code of interracial etiquette; and they were to be reinforced in their obedience to caste rules through formal schooling." For the Negro formal schooling meant primarily a "special education" that corresponded to his position in southern society. That special education was to be generally vocations in nature and it was vocational education that Dillard supported and promoted in his public statements and through his direction of such programs as the Jeanes teacher and the county training institutes. In a letter of instruction to all teachers in the Jeanes supervisor program, he wrote, "You should introduce into the schools such simple forms of industrial work as may be needful and helpful, and will tend to show the connection between the school and the daily life of the community." Dillard participated in maintaining the traditional "Southern way of life."

At the same time his sixty-year dedication aid devotion to the cause of black education reflected his personal commitment to improving the wellbeing of black Americans. The activities of the Jeanes and Slater Funds were directed to promoting self-help for all blacks who had thrown down their buckets where they were. In stimulating white and black support for Negro education, these programs and others like them did in fact give blacks the opportunity, first, to improve their social and economic condition and second, and more importantly, to cultivate slowly an educated black leadership which would later challenge the fundamental assumptions of a society which had created Negro education as a separate concern within American education. Dillard worked with the social realities as he found them. His admirers claim that his was a position of pragmatic realism.

An assessment of the significance of James Hardy Dillard in the history of American education is open to all the contradictions inherent in interpreting the history of black - white relations in America. It is, however, a fact that he, and the deeds of philanthropy he symbolizes, played an important role in the history of black education during the first decades of this century.