The Importance of Education
This transcript displays the courses that Ruth Anna Fisher took during her time at Oberlin from 1902-1906. As would be expected of a liberal arts education, Ruth Anna’s time at Oberlin was marked by a diverse array of classes, including a mix of natural sciences and mathematics and humanities. However, the most striking feature of Fisher’s transcript is the startling focus on languages, including Latin, Greek, English, Old English, German, and Italian. Her standard course work was also supplemented by a bibliography course and an archaeology course, as well as various other elective classes.[i] Also not included on her transcript was the possibility of her attendance of the conservatory of music. Though the transcript possesses no such statement, the college records and a reference by President King suggest that, during her time at Oberlin, she may also have attended the Conservatory of Music. Despite the breadth of her education, she would affirm in “J. Franklin Jameson: A Tribute” that “English and Latin were…[her] particular loves,” which was reflected in her taking no less than eleven English courses and four Latin courses at the college, as well as in her eventual decision to major in those subjects.[ii]
The decision to double major in two intense and relatively unrelated subjects such as Latin and English would not have been easy, and the course loads that Ruth Anna Fisher took would have been academically rigorous and difficult on one so young as Fisher, who was 16 at the time of enrolling in the college. However, Fisher, who even in old age would be described as strong-willed and “stubborn” by her friends, would have been eager to prove herself.[iii] Despite being from a privileged African American family within the Lorain County community, Ruth Anna must have been determined to undermine any racially and gendered biased notions of her abilities through the demonstration of her academic rigor. Later, when she was fired from the Tuskegee Institute, President King of Oberlin College would explain away her supposed failure through the expression that she would have had reduced rigor as a conservatory student and that she had “failed at the exact points where [Oberlin would ] wish [their] graduates to prove their strength.[iv] However, in context of the racial and gendered stereotypes often levied at people of color, even at a seeminlgly progressive place of education such as Oberlin, having been one the first multiracial colleges and cocurricular colleges, President King’s explanation of her supposed incompetence renders the biased notions of educated women of color as plainly evident. Given these circumstances, Ruth Anna’s choice to double major in English and Latin was almost certainly an attempt at claiming academic credibility for herself moving forward, as well as an attempt to follow her interests.
In either case, after graduating from Oberlin College in 1906, Ruth Anna did follow the path of many educated women who turned to work in education and was offered a teaching position at the Tuskegee Institute, the acclaimed school for African American men under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. However, as previously discussed, signs of strain between Ruth Anna and the administration of the Institute began to emerge soon after she began her employment. According to Washington, Fisher “refused to carry out [the head of the academic department’s] wishes in regard to correlating the academic and industrial work,” despite several attempts by the department head to convince her.[v] Due to this conflict, Booker T. Washington not only fired Fisher but wrote the President King of Oberlin expressing his dissatisfaction, to which King responded apologetically that the failures of Mrs. Fisher were not typical of the institution. However, Fisher’s conflict with Washington’s Institute may well not have been due to some personal failing of hers but rather was intimately related to the nature of an Oberlin education.[vi] While Oberlin’s motto remains “Learning and Labor” to this day, the labor of Oberlin has morphed from that of the physical labor explored by Washington’s pedagogical methods into rigorous academic work. Thus, when Fisher was confronted with the educational experience envisioned by Washington, she would have most likely outright rejected the industrially focused nature of the Tuskegee Institute in favor of an Oberlin-birthed educational approach parallel to that of W.E.B. DuBois.
Despite her dramatic confrontation with Booker T. Washington, Ruth Anna, stubborn as ever, persevered in her academic pursuits. After a period as a private tutor and educator in Lorain,[vii] she became head of the English Department at the Manassas Industrial School in Virginia for a year[viii], studied at the Canadian Academy of Music, managed a YWCA in New York City[ix] and developed a study of rural education.[x] Despite this impressive resume, Ruth Anna Fisher would have been progressing through her career against a bloody and turbulent backdrop. During this period following the Second World War, American racial politics took a turn for the worse as the Red Summer began, with lynching’s under a renewed KKK lashing out across the South and race riots occurring in Chicago’s South Side. At the YWCA, Ruth Anna Fisher, working with Eva Del Vakia Bowles and other activists during the Harlem Renaissance, would have been exposed to daily struggles against racial injustice as she encountered those men returning from the battlefields of First World War.[xi] Confronted with these realities of racial violence and injustice, Ruth Anna would have been reluctant to stay in a society in which she would barely be afforded recognition for her work and was in constant danger of being assaulted. The academically laborious and high-quality work that Fisher would have come to expect not only of herself but for others during her time at Oberlin would be a near impossibility in the surrounding racial context of the United States. Accordingly, when she met a white couple who were willing to underwrite a year of study abroad for her, she chose to go where she chose to travel to Europe, where she could fully realize her academic potential. Thus, in 1921 she began studying at London School of Economics.[xii]
There Ruth Anna would have encountered a black community with a similar vibrancy to New York’s, particularly in her Parisian travels as the European counterpart to the Harlem Renaissance thrived in post-war France. Here, in this environment of comparative racial acceptance and academic rigor, Fisher would have been more readily able to complete her work and find professional inroads into academia. This would, of course, be proven by her employment by James Franklin Jameson and her subsequent employment by the Library of Congress.
While Ruth Anna’s time at Oberlin would prove to be a time of learning and rigor as it is with all students, Oberlin’s distinct approach to education, based not on just learning or industrial progress, but on the importance of academic rigor and work in the name of progress, would prove central Fisher’s philosophy as both an educator and later a historian. As Ruth Anna progressed in her wide-ranging fields and interests and engaged in the academic work of an African-American woman progressing through the world of white masculinist academia, she found the foundations of her work in her time at Oberlin.
[i] Transcript of Ruth Anna Fisher, 1906, Box 329, Ruth Anna Fisher Student File, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.
[ii] Ruth Anna Fisher, “A Tribute” in J. Franklin Jameson: A Tribute, ed. Ruth Anna Fisher. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 6.
[iii] Sylvia Lyons Render, “Afro-American Women: The Outstanding and the Obscure”. The
Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32, no. 4 (1975): 21.
[iv] Correspondence from Henry Churchill King to Booker T. Washington, 26 November 1906. Correspondence series, Presidential Records, Box 77, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.
[v] Correspondence from Booker T Washington to Ruth Anna Fisher, in Booker T. Washington Papers Volume 9: 1906-8, ed., Louis R. Harlan, Raymond Smock, Ed. Nan E. Woodruff. (United Kingdom: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 125-126.
[vi] Unknown Author, “John L. Dube and Booker T. Washington: Ohlange and Tuskegee,” Oberlin College, accessed May 12 2020, https://www2.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/Dube/Booker%20essay.htm#_ftn11.
[vii]Render, 316.
[viii] Virginia School Report: Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. United States: Superintendent of Public Printing, 1910.
[ix] Render, 316.
[x] Correspondence from W.E.B. DuBois to Ruth Anna Fisher, 2 December 1909. MS 312, W.E.B DuBois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Libraries, Amherst, Massachusetts.
[xi] Lean'tin L. Bracks and Jessie Carney Smith, eds. Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era. Lanham (MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), 26-27.
[xii] Render, 316.