From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (review)

Traditional histories of black education in the United States tend to portray African Americans as objects, not subjects. Things were always being done to them; they were never or rarely autonomous agents. However, the last two decades have seen a dramatic shift from a race-relations model that places African Americans on the periphery to an "agency" model in which African Americans are at the center of their own history. Span has produced an excellent example of this latter trend. Confining his work to Mississippi from 1862 to the end of Reconstruction in 1875, Span demonstrates that in the quest for a comprehensive tax-supported public-school system, African Americans played a central role at every stage.

Span divides his books into two parts. Part I (Chapters 1–3), covering the years 1882 to1870, shows how the origins of universal education came from former slaves in Mississippi, not at the behest of northern missionaries, as most assume. Though influential in the process, the missionaries often disagreed with the type of education that African Americans wanted for themselves and their children. Not surprisingly, white reaction to black education was often violent; however, some whites supported limited education for blacks and even started schools on their plantations.

Part II, covering the years 1870 to 1875, concentrates on the quest of African Americans to control their education. The cost of public education in Mississippi escalated during this period, and the violent white reaction scaled back progress for black education in Mississippi for the next century.

The earliest educational efforts by Africans Americans had begun under slavery with self-teaching, Sabbath schools, and native schools. During Reconstruction, northern missionaries felt that the former slaves were not "developed" enough to run their own affairs. This conflict persisted until the end of the period that Span discusses, when northerners largely retreated from the South, leaving the field to southern whites.

The danger, as most Mississippi whites saw it, lay in the kind of education that African Americans wanted for themselves and their children—a liberal-arts education meant to produce autonomous and full citizens of the state. Public schools promoting this ideal were therefore physically, financially, and legally attacked. The comprehensive education that finally emerged in 1868 was a dual system, one for African Americans and one for whites; the black school system was geared to producing skilled laborers, not scholars. Nonetheless, nearly a century later, African Americans once again challenged the system in order to achieve educational equality.

Span's book, grounded as it is in prodigious archival research, can well serve as an exemplar for other southern state histories of black educational efforts before, during, and after the Civil War. Those interested in African-American history, Southern history, Reconstruction history, and African-American educational history will find it most informative.