Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Hilary Green (review)

Hilary Green's Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 adds nicely to our understanding of the extended nature of Reconstruction in the American South. Remaking the racial patterns of political, social, and economic life in the former Confederacy did not end with the departure of the Freedmen's Bureau and federal troops during the 1870s. Nor did the full weight of Jim Crow laws immediately come crashing down on African Americans with the official end of Reconstruction in 1877. Rather, former slaves and their children continued pressing to gain the full privileges of citizenship—privileges to which they felt they were entitled and that they believed they had been promised at the time of their emancipation.

As the title suggests, Educational Reconstruction considers this process through the lens of public education in the urban South. Specifically, Green focuses on the cities of Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama, and explores the emergence and development of schools for African Americans through three distinct periods. The first two chapters detail the initial establishment of schools for freed-people by northern philanthropic societies, the Freedmen's Bureau, and freedpeople themselves. The next six chapters explore the transition to state-supported education that occurred after 1870 in both Richmond and Mobile and the "quality school campaigns" waged in each to effect improved conditions in the cities' racially segregated public school systems. Finally, an extended epilogue analyzes factors behind the failure of Congress to enact the Blair Education Bill in 1890 and the subsequent ascendancy of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model of industrial education for southern blacks.

Green's research draws heavily on a variety of public records from the local, state, and federal levels; the archives of numerous religious and philanthropic organizations; and newspapers from Boston to New Orleans. From them she is often able to present the hopes and fears of African American educators, voters, and parents in their own words and demonstrate convincingly their belief that a quality education was essential to their campaign for full freedom and citizenship. That campaign, however, was never in the hands of African Americans alone. Green demonstrates convincingly that between 1865 and 1890 southern blacks found and worked with a changing array of white allies in their effort to secure a quality education for themselves and their children. These white allies did not control black efforts to improve their schools; in both Richmond and Mobile African Americans knew what they wanted, articulated their demands clearly, and worked for them tirelessly. The presence and commitment of white allies was important, though. Indeed, Green maintains, it was the presence in Virginia of the Readjuster Party that explains why blacks in Richmond enjoyed greater success in their campaign for quality schools than their counterparts in Mobile did.

Educational Reconstruction makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of southern society during the final third of the nineteenth century. It joins the work of scholars such as Steven Hahn and Michael Perman in demonstrating that black and white southerners continued to negotiate the boundaries of a new reality for years after federal troops left the region. In one regard, however, Green's interpretation of educational reconstruction may require a corrective. She views the triumph of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model as one of rural black southerners over their urban brother and sisters, yet in Southwest Virginia, at least, rural blacks also objected loudly to the shift from a more classical education to an industrial model.

That notwithstanding, Hilary Green's Educational Reconstruction offers a valuable study of the long and determined effort made by black southerners to achieve educational equality in the decades immediately after the abolition of slavery.