John Wesley Manning ('81)
John Wesley Manning (1857-1922) was one of Yale’s first Black alumni, Class of 1881, persevering to earn a college degree during a time in which his intellectual capacity, his rights, and even his humanity as a Black man was being questioned. Later in life, Manning would work to improve the educational opportunities of young Black students in segregated schools in the American South. Manning represents the long history of Black Yale alumni who have pursued careers in education.
John Wesley Manning was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. During the American Civil War, John’s parents, Alfred and Eliza (Allston) Manning stowed John on a Union steamship headed to New Haven, where they and a few other members of their family eventually joined him in freedom. John Wesley Manning’s parents, both being illiterate, hoped their children could access educational opportunities unavailable to them. And so, Manning attended the Hopkins Grammar School, a prestigious private school in New Haven, and would eventually matriculate to Yale in 1877. In an interesting turn, Manning had ended up attending the same college as his family’s enslaver, Samuel Johnston, who graduated from Yale in the 18th century. And so, Manning’s academic journey symbolized a powerful shift in educational opportunity and representation for Black Americans following the Civil War.
However, the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War that legally allowed Manning and fellow Black scholars to attend Yale did not protect them from continually mounting prejudices both at the university and after graduation. At Yale, Reconstruction was, according to David W. Blight, “questioned and often condemned, while the extralegal regime of [white] terror was romanticized or condoned” (249). And after graduation, the legalized discrimination of Black Americans through Jim Crow laws prevented Manning and many other Black scholars from finding jobs in universities and laboratories, even at their alma mater. So, Manning and many of his contemporaries adapted to these career limitations and translated what they had gained from Yale into educating the next generation of young Black students. Manning returned to the South, becoming the principal of Austin High School, a segregated school in Knoxville, Tennessee.
As principal of Austin High School, which was founded in 1879 as Knoxville’s first Black high school, Manning worked to structure the curriculum while also teaching Latin until his retirement in 1912. Impacted by his time there, he even wrote a history of the school. Manning further expanded his educational outreach by taking leadership in the East Tennessee Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, the Tennessee Conference of Educational Workers, and by participating in the Southern Sociological Congress in 1915.
Just as his parents had risked their lives to create educational opportunities for him, Manning fought against the confines of Jim Crow America to ensure that Black students in the South could reap the educational and social rewards promised alongside their freedom.
Bibliography
- Blight, David W. Yale and Slavery. Yale University Press, 2024.
- Booker, Robert J. “Austin High School.” Profiles of African Americans in Tennessee,
edited by Bobby L. Lovett, Linda T. Wynn, The Annual Local Conference on Afro-American Culture and History, 1996, pp. 4-5.
- “Yale’s Ties to Slavery: Confronting a Painful History, Building a Stronger Community.”
The Yale and Slavery Project. https://yaleandslavery.yale.edu/