The president of Dillard offered both of us positions. The course load there was fifteen hours a week; we would not be obligated to teach summer school. Unlike Philander Smith, where I had taught history, languages and political science, at Dillard I would only teach history, including the introductory American history course. I was very interested in teaching this course, because it would give me the opportunity to acquaint the students, who had only been exposed to the official Southern version of history, with alternative, problem oriented interpretations.
Dillard differed from Philander Smith in various ways. Supported by the liberal Congregationalist as well as by the white Methodist Church, it had higher social and academic ambitions. The students came predominantly from the black middle class in New Orleans. They were academically better prepared, and the credentials of the black faculty were on the average more impressive than at Philander Smith. The school was located on a beautiful campus with white, Grecian style buildings in a large, park-like area.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 83f
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I enjoyed teaching the American history survey at Dillard. I had never taken a course in American history and learned a lot while preparing for the classes. I supplemented the textbook readings for each period of American history with Rayford Logans useful small collections of documents on American black history. I also used the Heath series of Problems in American History with its presentation of differing interpretations of selected topics in American history. A major focus of my classes was the Reconstruction. The students only knew the official account they had been taught in the Louisiana high schools, according to which Reconstruction was a tragic period when Northerners used Blacks, who were unable to govern, to impose their will on a helpless South. We read John Randall’s chapter on the South Carolina legislature in his Civil War and Reconstruction, in which he expounds this thesis, and W. E. B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction describing the positive achievements of Blacks in the South Carolina legislature, who succeeded in finally bringing that state into the nineteenth century.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 87f