MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1890, the Virginia Legislature chartered an institution “for the benefit of orphans of the colored race…in order to rescue them from…lives of shame and crime, and to endeavor to make of them…useful members of society.” Founding an orphanage in this period of cruelty-consciousness and child-saving is nothing remarkable, but the mission of the Colored Orphan Asylum and Industrial School was fundamentally different from similar institutions for white children. The history of orphanages is long and largely critical, particularly since the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and the simultaneous rise of the new social history. Both of these trends saw orphanages as instruments of social control and hegemony, but these overly simplistic generalizations have been questioned by later historians. The picture that emerges of orphanages is still far from rosy, but it is far more complex. Different institutions had different missions, policies, and clientele, and they served different purposes for different classes: education and relief for the working poor, and social control and socialization for the powerful. This seems nowhere more evident than in institutions intended to socialize black children away from their “brutal” and “shame[ful]” families, and yet not a lot of work has been done on colored orphan asylums—especially in the South. The Lynchburg COAIS offers a combination of elements that has not been at all well-studied: an orphanage for African-American children in the South. Examining this institution, I illuminate broader Southern views of child welfare, African Americans, and the intersection of both.