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

Earlier educational studies written by scholars such as James Anderson, Heather Williams, Jacqueline Jones, and Ronald Butchart, to name a few, have brought into view the powerful narrative that African Americans regarded education as integral to freedom and citizenship, especially in the nineteenth-century United States. Hilary Green deepens this narrative in her intriguing study of the social, political, and economic dimensions of African American education in two port cities that were both major urban industrial centers: Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama. Using an array of archival sources from state governmental records to speeches and poetry, Green captures the collective desire among African Americans to "become an educated people" (17). Building such an educated identity, however, was fraught with numerous challenges, including violent white reprisals, severe racial abuse, political backlash, and economic downturns. Remarkably, African Americans achieved significant educational success with the establishment of public primary and normal schools as well as the emergence of a corps of African American educators.

Green devises a useful, three-stage framework to illustrate the role of African American parents, teachers, and community leaders in building and maintaining public schools in the post–Civil War era, a historical moment that she calls "educational reconstruction." The first stage, from 1865 to 1870, follows the role of the Freedmen's Bureau in helping African Americans set up schools; the second stage, from 1870 to the early 1880s, coincides with the closure of the Freedmen's Bureau and the rise of the quality public schools campaign; and the third stage, from the 1880s to 1890, covers the failure of the Blair Education Bill. Green devotes much of her book to the second stage, as she argues that the quality public schools campaign pushed the parameters of educational reconstruction. In both Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama, African Americans fought for the hiring of African American teachers, the expansion of the public school system, and better school funding. Throughout this period, African Americans sought educational access and legitimacy as they clung to their belief in racial uplift.

A belief in the value of education among African Americans coupled with continued activism produced three key outcomes. First, African Americans built institutions from the "ground up" (6). In Richmond, for instance, the Colored Normal and High School trained teachers and administrators who together proved that African Americans were smart and capable. Likewise, in Mobile, teachers at Broad Street Academy "instilled racial pride and the rhetoric of racial progress" in students (102). Second, African American teachers and administrators constituted a cadre of educator-activists who gradually expanded the middle class in the urban South. Third, this cadre of educator-activists taught African American children and youth values such as discipline, hard work, and morality. Green acknowledges that children had to negotiate the tense political climate of the urban South. In one incident, children at a Richmond-area public school heckled white female Southerners who were commemorating fallen Confederate soldiers. Their white teacher admonished them and reminded them to be respectful. The future generation could thus follow an educational path to greatness and respectability.

Green also presents a convincing case for the inclusion of the African American schoolhouse in the history of the post–Civil War South. In Mobile, Alabama, arsonists attacked and destroyed Emerson Normal, not once, but twice, in the 1870s and 1880s. Despite these efforts to isolate the African American schoolhouse, to cheapen it, to make it clandestine as it had been during slavery, or, even, to raze it from the landscape, African American activism ensured its permanence. Indeed, the schoolhouse was not only a unifying image among African Americans, but it also became a powerful regional icon imbued with political meaning. Green has opened a path of inquiry for subsequent scholarship to explore the shifting meaning of the African American schoolhouse throughout the twentieth century, particularly leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

During this twenty-five-year...