Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 by Hilary Green (review)

Although the alacrity with which freedpeople embraced postemancipation education is a familiar feature of Reconstruction narratives, schooling is often treated as peripheral to, and sometimes even at odds with, the real political action of the era. In this crisply written and resourcefully researched new book, Hilary Green offers a compelling new interpretation of postwar education as a key site of African American political mobilization during Reconstruction and beyond. Citizenship, rather than social control, frames her investigation, which offers new insight into postemancipation African American politics that highlights adaptability and an abiding commitment to education as a key feature of freedom. Green argues schools were important not only as sites of educational opportunity but also as centers of political action.

Educational Reconstruction examines the creation of publicly funded schools in post–Civil War Richmond and Mobile. In its urban focus, Green's work joins that of Kate Masur and others in bringing new attention to the importance of cities as sites of postemancipation political experimentation. The dual city focus facilitates comparisons that demonstrate the real gains federal Reconstruction policies brought across the South while also illuminating the impact of highly local circumstances on educational access. Grounding her research in missionary, Freedmen's Bureau, and local governmental records enables Green to center her narrative on African American activism rather than a single organization. This in turn uncovers surprising continuity in African American influence on educational practices across the volatile political period between 1865 and 1890. Her work challenges the idea that the withdrawal of the Freedmen's Bureau, and even Redemption, precipitated a declension in African American educational access. Instead Green demonstrates that leaders in Richmond and the more hostile context of Mobile continued to make real gains in access to schools, both as students and teachers, by effectively deploying a range of political practices including petitioning, rallies, and the strategic cultivation of white allies. The book details African American leadership in shepherding the transition from northern management of freedpeople's schools to local control in ways that preserved many gains made during Reconstruction. Focusing on the ensuing struggles over public schools, Green develops a fine-grained portrait of political negotiations within fractured local communities with little federal oversight.

Green's work focuses on not only educational access, but also the vision African Americans nurtured regarding its relationship to freedom. She argues that access and quality education were consistent objectives shaping postwar public schools as well as the political actions that made them possible. For example, African Americans in Richmond overcame their white allies' insistence that teacher training should come only after broad elementary education to establish the Richmond Colored Normal School, which in turn provided quality teachers to black schools. Such institutionalized gains fostered counter-memories that extended Reconstruction's inclusive vision of citizenship beyond its nominal end. Green argues the whole complex of practices that developed around schools "unified urban African Americans around a collective identity and culture reflective of their free status and Confederate defeat" (3). The book's emphasis on unity is convincing but also leaves the consequences of the schools' exclusions for future exploration. For example, additional scholarship could explore children within each city and from surrounding communities. Similarly, a richer discussion of how classroom content differed among schools would have further contextualized her contention that access mattered more to African Americans than the educational model to which schools adhered. Green provides tantalizing glimpses of grassroots political action, from women demanding teaching posts to schoolchildren protesting Confederate celebrations, that suggest further investigation of postwar schooling might reveal the persistence of a radically democratized politics.

In addition to providing a nuanced account of the establishment of public schools in Richmond and Mobile, Educational Reconstruction makes important contributions to the ongoing reconsideration of Reconstruction's periodization and impact. It demonstrates that Reconstruction mattered profoundly for postwar politics long after 1877. Green argues the 1890...