Knowledge Is Power: Segregation, Education, and the (African) American Mind

In June 2002, sixty-nine-year-old Mississippi-born Johnnie Mae Dorris née Sheperd graduated from high school in Urbana, Illinois. The "irony would be," her grandson-in-law Christopher M. Span notes in the conclusion of his study on black education in Mississippi after the Civil War, "that the school she attended as a young child was very much reminiscent of the type of school [George Washington] Albright taught in when he emerged from slavery, and that Ida B. Wells, Belle Caruthers, and others would recall attending as young children in the first decade of emancipation" (p. 177). This closing point to a study examining the Civil War and Reconstruction period raises a few uncomfortable questions that might seem easy to answer upon first glance, such as why the decades after the 1870s appear to have been decades of stagnation from the perspective of African Americans.

The two monographs under review undertake to present important and nuanced new studies to broaden our understanding of the formation of African Americans—and thus, also of Americans generally—during the century of racial trials between the 1860s and 1960s. Christopher M. Span and Anne C. Rose cover ground ranging from initial successes during the Reconstruction period to the lasting and more challenging effects of racism and white supremacy on Americans, especially African Americans, in their efforts to raise children in a world tainted by the hatred and prejudices that were rooted in more or less noticeable ways in the Southern caste system of chattel slavery. Whereas Span focuses, in a thorough and closely defined case study, on black grassroots activism to establish schools for African Americans, Rose attempts to construct a broader picture of the South generally and the role that psychology played for both whites and blacks in dealing with the still highly sensitive "race-issue."

Span's solid case study may be taken as representative for the South at large. It zooms in on the years from the early Civil War to the near-end of Reconstruction and is divided into two parts of three and two chapters, respectively. Part one focuses on the role of education for blacks as well as attitudes on the part of whites up to 1870. Span does not restrict himself to exclusively examining schools but, more or less directly, keeps reminding his readers that education is closely intertwined with numerous aspects of society, for which it provides a foundation. Education thus has a central cultural function: it is a means to gain access to institutions and organizations and is therefore a fundamental precondition for executing power. Span consequently also discusses other, at first glance unrelated, subjects, such as attitudes toward labor. For example, he relates how white Southern planters experimented with recruiting immigrants to replace slave labor, a short-lived experiment due to the fact that, first of all, most foreigners did not tolerate the fierce Mississippi climate; and, second, that they had different work ethics—they worked fewer hours than blacks and had little sympathy for white Southern planters' expectations, which had been groomed by centuries of master-slave relationships (pp. 90-91).

In the second part, which discusses the first half of the 1870s, Span's attention shifts to presenting the idea of public schooling in a larger context. He briefly covers the historical origins of public schooling for whites in Mississippi as well as similar developments elsewhere in the South. His somewhat daunting conclusion is that, while we have African Americans to thank for the establishment of a universal system of public education, they benefitted least from it—a fact that is illustrated with the life of Johnnie Mae Sheperd, whose successful and touching high school graduation in 2002 is...