Summary Of The Education Of Blacks In The South By James Anderson

What is the purpose and mission of universal schooling? Why are philanthropic white Northern reformers’ supportive of African-Americans’ goals of literacy and universal education? How can historians reconcile the educational advancement of African-Americans with their status as second-class citizens throughout the Eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow? In The Education of Blacks in the South (1988), James Anderson explores the race, labor, and education questions through the lens of black educational philosophy. Anderson challenges the prevailing narrative that universal public education emerged from white Northern missionaries dedicated to civilizing newly emancipated Negroes in the South. To the contrary, Anderson forcefully argues that African-American

Republican politicians, coupled with the assistance from Northern missionaries, used government as a vehicle to push for social reform—most notably through the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865. “Most northern missionaries went south with the preconceived idea that the slave regime was so brutal and dehumanizing that blacks were little more than uncivilized victims who needed to be taught the values and rules of civil society.” Newly-emancipated African-Americans argued that “self-determination in the educational sphere” prompted greater autonomy and agency. Anderson’s argument about African-American self-determination challenges the dominate narrative that federal largesse from the Freedmen’s Bureau and white Northerners established universal education in the South. In chapter II, Anderson explores the different modes of educational training black students in the South. More specifically, he sheds light upon the Hampton Model of industrial education founded by Booker T. Washington and Samuel Chapman Armstrong. The Hampton-Tuskegee Model emphasized (trade) industrial education—ex. the development of technical skills for manual-labor. “Armstrong represented a social class, ideology, and world outlook that was fundamentally different from and opposed to the interests of the

More specifically, he argues that the common goals freed slaves faced between 1830 and 1860—racial animus and Southern planters’ resistance— resurfaced again in the early 1900s. The planter class used their financial and political wherewithal to subjugate black laborers in a state of perpetual servitude—ex. sharecropping. “Keep the Negroes in the South and make them satisfied with their lot.” In response, the Negro Rural School Fund employed industrial supervisors to teach black educators. James Anderson also recounts the urbanization of the South and its impact upon the public education landscape. He sheds light upon the absence of black high schools in rural areas in the years following Reconstruction. “The most oppressive feature of black secondary education was that southern local and state governments, through maintaining and expanding the benefits of public secondary education for white children, refused to provide public high school facilities for black children.” In sum, Anderson uses this chapter to build a broader argument about the “separate, but equal doctrine” under Plessy v. Ferguson that mandated segregation. More specifically, he situates this argument through case studies in Lynchburg, VA and Little Rock, AR. In the culminating chapter, James Anderson discusses the emergence of historically black universities and black land-grant colleges. He