Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 [review]

If white supremacy was an illness afflicting America, Black disenfranchisement would be that cough that never goes away. Resonant, persistent, rattling to the bones and always that with which the sufferer writes off with excuses of other causes.

Yet when talking about the roots of Black inequality becomes an exercise in blame, defensiveness and simply telling people to get over it, we never really get to true emancipation.

In Schooling the Freed People: Teching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Ronald Butchart casts a light on a moment in history that was perhaps almost as significant as the end of slavery itself: the Reconstruction effort to educate Blacks as equal members of a society that had heretofore, even in the North, treated them as second-class citizens.

What is most revealing in this exhaustively researched work is not just the sheer hostility faced by Black teachers and students, but rather whites’ subtle machinations to undercut the potential for Black agency and autonomy. Butchart frequently reminds the reader that Southern white teachers’ role in educating newly freed Blacks was less about helping and more about control. As in any educational exercise, curricula are often shaped by racial, gender and class orientations. In the contentious South, where the original culture war was in full swing, education was more about socializing people to a way of life than arithmetic and language. White norms and expectations of proper behavior and cultural perspectives — many of which were a legacy of the pre-Civil War generation from which white teachers from the South as well as the North — crept into the teaching method and thus the learning environment. The result? What could have been a shining moment for the country, a time when freed Blacks had opportunities to fully participate as American citizens instead became a moment that conveyed the lengths by which white people, collaborating to consolidate their hold on and ownership of power structures, would seek to indoctrinate Blacks to see themselves as merely players in a white man’s world.

Schooling the Freed People offers some unique looks at the history of Black teachers seeking to break down this approach by teaching freed former slaves in a different way. Their understanding of literacy as a means of self-defense (from fraud and the like) and education as a means of understanding the world were examples of popular education nearly a century before Freire, and under much more politically sensitive and dangerous conditions.

Butchart’s writing is beautiful and vivid. The stories of Southern resistance to Black education and the matters that have faint echoes today — Southern communities not wanting particular teachers bringing ‘their’ views to students while not acknowledging how majority views are taught — should prompt us all to consider power and privilege in everyday life.

Similar Posts:

• A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia [review]
• Working From Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools [review]
• Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay [review]
• Mexican Teachers Strike, Protest Over Test-Driven Education
• How the Corporate Right Divided Blacks from Teachers’ Unions and Each Other