Joyner, James Yadkin
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Joyner, James Yadkin
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An advocate of public education in the state of North Carolina
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Dr. James Yadkin Joyner was the North Carolina State Superintendent of Public Instruction, a Meredith College trustee for fifty-four years, and an indefatigable advocate for educational reform, textbooks and adult education. He was also a staunch segregationist and architect of Jim Crow in North Carolina. In a 1903 interview Joyner encouraged African American education because to “Turn such a wild horde loose among our people, endowed with the rights of freedom without the knowledge to use it, controlled by the passions of animals without the power to restrain them that comes alone from proper education, and our only safety will lie in extermination. With the negro it must be elevation through proper education or extermination.” Joyner proclaimed African Americans to be “a weaker—a child race” that is “but one generation removed from bondage and ten generations from savagery, with essentially different racial traits and endowments.” Accordingly, Joyner decreed, “No child with negro blood in his veins, however remote the strain, shall attend a school for the white race.” Joyner further asserted “The education of each race must be vitally connected with the life that the race must lead and wisely adapted to the sphere that the race and the individual must fill” and “the sphere the negro must fill is industrial and agricultural and, therefore, his education must be largely industrial and agricultural.” Joyner used this differing educational model to underfund systematically Black schools, which he asserted, “if quietly managed, the negroes will give no trouble about it.”
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7 August 1862
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24 January 1954
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